Congratulations! You’ve managed to negotiate your way through another year. A year in which the media, celebrities and politicians — or as we collectively refer to them “twats” — flagellated themselves over hot coals for our viewing pleasure, desperately trying to convince us they shared the revulsion felt by actual human beings as to their own basic existence.

Well done to London, who hosted a sporting festival I probably can’t name for legal reasons, which saw Prince William in an Adidas top and the Queen of England jump from a helicopter, to celebrate some of the world’s most dedicated athletes reduce themselves to corporate salves in a multi-platform internationally syndicated best arse competition, pre-emptively won by Jessica Ennis.

It was also a big year for cynicism. Which is typical of my luck. Who’d have thought that the one noun which describes my entire worldview becoming a fashion trend would happen in the same year I got my first ever shirt and tie office job. Probably the same sort of person who predicted the company would go bust before anyone got paid.

On the upside, Tesco released a new range of ready meals for £1, while ditching the much loved blue and white ‘back to basics’ packaging of their Tesco Value range. Now the Chicken Jalfrezi with Rice microwave meal for one die cut box-art sports a brightly coloured dinner table scene with a welcoming fireplace in the background, and a lady’s delicate hand spooning the last flakes of rice onto a bone china plate with a shiny silver fork. Which I for one thought rather cruelly parodied the subzero concrete floor and food splattered microwave oven backdrop which usually plays host to this veritable feast of textured aromas and gastric chemistry par excellence. But hey, every little helps.

It was also a landmark year for gun control, in the United States. With the senseless destruction of innocent lives by gun wielding maniac after gun wielding maniac, aimlessly reigning murder upon the streets, 35 thousand feet above the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Northwest Pakistan. And how touching were the scenes, as people in their thousands lined the streets to protest and say “No more”, to the loony liberal media who turned a blind eye while peace loving libertarians warned such carnage would inevitably result from the removal of their God from the classroom.

And let us raise our glasses to the memory of those who we lost. The relentless charity work of the prolific peadophile and face of the BBC, Sir Jimmy Savile, whose actions were so well covered up, only a handful of senior television and radio executives, production assistants, presenters, editors, journalists and talk-show hosts knew about them for over 30 years. They’re cunning these weirdly dressed, cigar stenching child molesters. Who’d have thought that the ostensible altruism of Savile, who lived with his dead mum’s corpse, and surrounded himself with disabled children and psychiatric patients, masked such a sinister system of nods and winks between major multimillionaire players in the children’s entertainment industry.

Talking of Justin Beiber, it was a big year for the North East music scene, with James Arthur winning The X Factor. Who’d have thought it, eh? One hard working, guitar toting lad from the subdued town of Saltburn by the Sea heroically fighting off competition from thousands of hopefuls across the nation, who didn’t already have a development deal with SyCo Fremantle Thames TalkBack Sony BMG.

But as the nation was gripped with £1:50 a-go SMS fever, our attention was cruelly distracted by storm winds and floods around the world. While half of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States was plunged under a tidal wave of piss and tears, minor flooding devastated a park bench in the sleepy suburb of Oxbridge, in the picturesque hamlet of Stockton-upon-Tees. “So much for global warming” the yokels on both sides of the Atlantic scoffed, in the face of their own inability to understand that warm water evaporates.

And so we enter another no-doubt gag-packed year of austerity measures and back-to-back re-runs of The Big Bang Theory on E4 — looking forward as we do to will they won’t they news of another feature packed iPhone, so we can Facebook each other in 3D about every detail of our life as a hen, curling out horrified eggs of righteous indignation towards the surveillance state.

Same shit, different IP address. Happy New Year.