A weekly column reproduced from the Bristol Evening Post

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It’s that time of year again when there’s only the big, hard yellow toffees left in the Quality Street tin. So it’s time to make a few resolutions.

I will not be rude about our gleaming, new Trumpton International Airport, even though the parking franchise is apparently run by Dick Turpin and some of the ticket desk girls would be far more at home on a tractor. Computers may have reached Somerset; computer training obviously hasn’t.

I will stop calling our local BBC radio station “Radio Ga-Ga”, especially as one of the Evening Post’s top men is about to join them as a reporter. Mind you, I am buying him a cardigan that smells of wee as a leaving present. And some slippers.

I will stop giving beggars first class rail tickets to Bath and I will stop glueing pound coins to the pavement in Broadmead and laughing at the resultant chaos.

Finally, I will stop being so beastly to the city council. It’s not their fault that we have one of the highest council taxes in Britain, but the worst schools, roads and buses. Err, well it is, actually.

Due to an appalling oversight on the part of my personal assistant Whittaker (who claimed to be suffering from concussion after an incident involving a choirboy and a croquet mallet), I inadvertently ended up in the second class section of a railway train the other day.

My God, it was like a scene from the sub-continent. It was packed to the gills, with children squealing, drunken soldiers singing and an all-pervading stench of armpits and cheeseburgers. All that was missing was a box of chickens and a wandering goat.

And if people weren’t hanging from the roof and sides of the train, it was only because the special Roof-Clinger Awayday tickets aren’t valid until after 10am.

Fleeing to the sanctity of first class, I was greeted by a prime example of that particularly irritating Bristol phenomenon, the rich student on his way back to “Uni”.

How could I tell he was rich? Well, for a start he was sitting in first class. A bloody student, in first class. I ask you.

Secondly, his Mummy had obviously combed his hair and made him wear a scarf before putting him on the train at Paddington. He was a right Fotherington-Thomas. He looked about 12 years old. All that was missing was his tuck box.

Thirdly, he was obviously from a public school background. How do I know? Well, by the time we’d reached Reading he’d already cleaned my shoes and fetched me a coffee.

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