Up close and personal with 2005's best

The great and the good, possibly. Some well known, some hardly known at all. A very rich sheikh from Dubai, the PM, the Deputy PM, Gerry Brownlee, Judith Collins and Nandor Tanczos.

A royal Zara, the woman who helped discover a planet, Bluey, the Little General. And, of course, Sean Connery and Marc Ellis and Twinkletoes Norm Hewitt, the amazing reinvented man. Oh yes, and Ahmed Zaoui and Martin Henderson.

Who would I want to spend a New Year's Eve with?

Any of them, or any combination, would make for an interesting evening, although with the PM there nobody would be able to nip out for a fag. I, for one, wouldn't want her to sniff me again as she did this year. We went to watch her read to some school kids. A teacher said: "She's just like the Queen."

A reader wrote to complain that she had played me like a violin. Well, of course she did. That's why she's the Queen and I'm not.

What fun - and thanks very much to the editor whose idea this was - to read through an entire year's worth of interviews from this page to fill today's page. Truly.

It is an interesting exercise, I suppose. A year's worth of humiliation. It might prove salutary for the next.

Did I really blurt to that sheikh: "I've never met a sheikh before?" Or write about Sean Connery: "I'm embarrassed to admit that shaking hands with Connery is like taking a big slug of a very good single malt: smooth as silk, punchy as peat and it travels slowly down and hits you in the knees. God knows how he does it."

Or say to Ahmed Zaoui: "You are a terrorist, aren't you? Yes. Thank you."

It seems I did. The only excuse can be that you had to be there. Which is rather the point of this page, I hope: that you felt as though you were. Which means that I will undoubtedly continue humiliating myself into the new year.

Some things I left out. How I made a right twit of myself cavorting along Orewa beach showing Brian "Bluey" McClennan, the Kiwis' coach, how to make monkey's tails out of monkey-puzzle tree fronds. He said, "Do your kids do that?" I had to say: "Aah, I don't have any". But I thought his kids might like to know how to make them.

Also, I wanted to show him that I was talented at something. He has that effect on people: that's why he's a terrific coach. He phoned to say, "Bluey here, mate. Just calling to say thanks for the kind words," and also to let me know that the kids loved the tails. Isn't he nice?

We saw him after he arrived home after that historic thrashing of the Aussies. After we'd seen him jumping up and down with joy on the telly. Everyone here said, "We have to talk to Bluey". We thought he'd be just lovely, and he was. It's nice when that happens. So, a pleasure Bluey, mate.

Most people are nice. Of course, that doesn't always make for the best interview. It did with Bluey, because he is also smart and warm and - so much for the hard men of league - wears his emotions on his sleeve.

And even those who were a bit prickly, thanks for the quotes. My favourite was from Zara Phillips, who so enjoyed the experience that she said: "Hold on to the banister when you go down the stairs". This was perhaps not kindly meant.

Almost all people are interesting but celebrity does not necessarily mean they are the most interesting.

But everyone said: "What was Sean Connery really like?" Just like Sean Connery. A bit grumpy, not very interested in navel-gazing. "Slightly detached from the idea of being Sean Connery and having to talk about being Sean Connery."

Still, he said he'd give us 20 minutes and he gave us 45. Because I just kept talking. "And don't think I didn't notice," he growled, but mildly. It may not be all that exciting for Sean Connery to be Sean Connery, but it was exciting meeting him.

The best fun encounter of the year was with that imp, broadcasting icon Henare te Ua. We know he's one because he said: "I'm an icon, you know". We went to see him because he'd written his memoir, In the Air. We met his partner, the long-suffering Dudley Moir.

"You've probably realised," said Te Ua, "that Dudley and I are gay, of course. We've been together 26 years and suddenly people are saying, 'Well, why haven't you written about being gay? ... ' Why should I?"

They were a lovely couple. Te Ua wrote me a line in the front of his book: "Your writing leaves much to be desired but it was great meeting you.". He told me he was "avuncular".

And, I wrote, "He does look quite sweet, but don't be fooled. He is about as cuddly as a kina." Meeting him was a treat.

Penny Vincenzi came to town flogging a blockbuster about, predictably, sex and money. She talked and talked. Quite loudly. In the lobby at the Hilton. About pubic hair. She said she was terribly dull but you had to doubt that about anyone who can write those sex scenes. She made me blush and wrote in the front of her book: "For Michele, from the dull woman with the pubic hair". I thought she was one of the few people I've interviewed who would be fun to get drunk with.

There was only one person I did get drunk with and that was that very bad influence, Richard Griffin. In my defence - I don't know that he needs any - we were both reasonably sober for at least the recorded hour of the interview.

Griffin is the ostensible Government relations manager for TVNZ. Neither of us ever managed to work out exactly what this means. We saw him in September and I don't think TVNZ's subsequent woes can in any way be attributed to the fact that we turned up at the telly station later in the evening calling for Bill Ralston's whiskey.

There wasn't any. Griffin had it all the last time he visited. So that was entertaining. As was watching, close up, a man whose greatest talent is charm at work. Charm is such a difficult thing to define, and impossible to replicate. Not many have it.

Martin Henderson, on his way to becoming a Hollywood star, has it. Well, I would say that. He sent me a packet of fags to repay the one cigarette he'd bludged many years ago on the set of Shortland Street.

Shy, sweet Stacey Jones has it, quietly.

The Woman Who Helped Discover a Planet, amateur astronomer Jennie McCormick, has it. When we went to see her she was wearing a tiny mini-dress and she has legs which went on forever. She wrote a poem about the first time she saw Saturn. She's a larger than the universe character and we sat in the dark and she talked about planets and "Where are all the big-brained men?" Probably on another planet, she concluded. I said the planet she helped discover should have been named after her "for services to livening up astronomy".

We met some other poets. Deborah Coddington, on her way out of politics, was a-gush with love for her new husband, Mr Carruthers. She said of her engagement ring: "I said to the jeweller: 'I want it to look like stars had fallen from the sky'." Lovely, that.

Nandor Tanczos spoke about going bush - before he found out he was going back to Parliament instead. He said he planned to "go and spend some time with some trees ... because trees have an amazing vibration ... they just sit there and they're alive and, I mean, obviously, they're plants, they're totally different from us."

Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to appear on this page. You were all, or mostly all, jolly good sports.