'Tis the (Silly) Season

Things one should find out, if one is to have the proverbial hell-snowball’s chance of understanding what the blue blazes this week's headlines were all about:

1.     Who or what a Rio Ferdinand is.

2.     Why The Derby has relocated to Manchester.

3.    What is so special about 21st December this year and whether we should all be staying in hotels on alien mountains for Christmas.

4.     What a 'bunga bunga' party is and whether Henry ought to have one for his next birthday.

5.    Does it not always get cold and snow in the winter?  Call me daft, but I seem to remember snow even in my Devonshire days.  Very well, yes, the snowmen were a bit on the small side, but damn it we made them with snow.  Why is it now such a sensation?

6.     Why fifty shades of grey are more exciting that fifty shades of yellow or orange.  Or Ardbeg.

7.     Where the Brillo pads are and how best to hide them from Patches and Fang.

8.   How one gets tickets to the next opening of the Ukrainian parliament.  If there continue to be such awesome displays of eye-gouging, I would most assuredly like to have front-row seats.

9.     If Mr Fforde – if that really is his name -- is so worried about repelling prospective students from Alester’s so-called university due to ‘champagning’, why does he not start by not terrorising his existing students to the point that they (in his own words) ‘go into hiding’?

10.  How, if a British viscount and sort of neighbour of mine gets banned for life from the United Nations for impersonating a sheikh and, separately, the representative from Burma, it merits only a quarter page in the Sunday Telegraph and nothing else.

Christopher, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley