KEY POINTS:
We have all heard it said often enough. Indeed, we've all probably said it ourselves more times than we'd care to admit.
It is, after all, one of those shop-worn truisms behind which we take refuge whenever the desire to express an original thought is betrayed by our brain's stubborn refusal to play ball. (That last phrase being a classic example!)
At such moments, as our synapses frantically endeavour to cobble together some personal insight that will impress Ms J.K. Rowling and the other dinner guests, a little voice in our head - the foreman of forethought, shall we say? - pronounces the dreaded verdict, "Forget it, mate. There's nothing here."
So, blushing on the inside, we fill the pregnant pause with the fruit of other learns because that's all we can harvest from the tree of knowledge at that particular time.
"Ah, well," we say, silently cringing, "every cloud has a silver lining." Or "too many crooks spoil the brothel." Or "rage before beauty" or more prosaically, "Christmas is a special time".
The one consolation such utterances offer is their incontrovertible truth, as that last example from Hackneyed Lane so clearly proves. Christmas is indeed "a special time", of that there is no doubt. Par-tick-ularly this year, when Santa Claus came out.
To be fair, some of us have had our doubts about Basil for a while - heck, you can't spend years telling everyone your sole ambition in life is to be a Cabinet minister without raising a few suspicions.
But that's neither heir nor there, really. Honi soit, as they say. Each to his own. Love and let love. What Basil does in the privacy of his own Santa suit is his affair and people in coconut trees shouldn't cast Stones.
Not when they can cast pearls of wisdom. As they can, thanks entirely to a very "special" Christmas which yielded more than the usual bounty of socks.
It's not every Yule that turns a truth upon its head, but this one did. It made an absolute mockery of the oft-uttered adage, "What goes up must come down."
You've almost certainly heard it - and said it - but it isn't true. Or, more precisely, the reverse is truer - if such a word exists.
And if it doesn't, it should. Because it is. It may well be true that what goes up must come down (although Parliamentary salaries seem to be an exception to that rule) but what is even truer is that what goes down must come up - especially when it's six bottles of 1973 Cold Duck unfortunately discovered in a cupboard just 17 hours before Basil's annual journey down the chimney.
A word of advice, folks. Should you ever find yourself emerging from some dusty cranny with several mouldering bottles of "dead" Duck and hear somebody say, "It would be a shame to waste it," then you must ignore them!
Do whatever it takes to erase their ludicrous suggestion from your mind. Because it would not be a shame to waste it. Au Cointreau! It would be a diabolical shame to drink it!
And it was.
The result of this reckless gustatory lapse is a "lost" Christmas A day spent go-ing rather than Ho-ing.
And a day when such decoration as was evident was principally, although sadly, not exclusively, confined to the bathroom.
That's something else worth remembering. When every mutinous part of your anatomy has violently erupted and you find yourself thinking, "It must be over now", be assured - it isn't!
The deadly beak of the old Cold Duck will find some crevice unexplored wherein to wreak yet further regurgitative havoc. Which it did.
Consequently, Christmas is a gastric blank; a porcelain interlude best left undescribed.
Happily, at least on this occasion, every Cold has a silver rhyming. One man's poison is another man's meat and who better to meet on the cusp of another twelvemonth than the extinguished poet laureate, Mr Jam Hipkins.
Conscious there are a few paragraphs still to fill, Mr Hipkins has nobly agreed to step into the (unsavoury) breeches with his annual poetical tribute:
'Tis time now to farewell this old year
'Tis time time now to bid it goodbye
And consign it to time's groaning graveyard
With nary a tear in our eye.
'Twas not what you would call a good year
With Taito a Field still unploughed
His harvest a crop of corruption
And privilege shamed but allowed.
And then there's that whine-maker's heaven
Our Parliament's own Withered Hill
Where treason betrays its own leader
Or thieves steal in order to kill.
Where nooky and Nicky competed for space
And sour was the taste of the brew
So carefully blended by vintners who stole
Your own money to buy votes from you.
So let us abandon this year of '06
A year full of stories too sad
For this was the last year the Kahui twins
And a boy in a van ever had.
Yes, these were our milestones in Godzone
This Land of the Long White Cloud
And that's why this last year goes to its grave
Wrapped in a long ugly shroud.
