By “in the New Year” I mean on Tuesday January 4th, after the Bank Holiday. (Note to Scottish readers – I see you have an extra one on that day as well. This seems unfair.)

Smoke!!!

Seeping through the bricks in the chimney, worming its smoky way into the very fibre of my happy home!!!

I give up. I admit that I should have done things properly in the first place and installed a chimney flue liner. After a couple of months of bodging repairs and patching up, there is nothing for it but to bite the bullet and to get in a professional to deal with it.

I engage the Cheerful Builder.

The materials arrive as ordered, which is a good sign. The Cheerful Builder climbs up to the chimney stack. To do this, he appears to balance one ladder on top of another ladder, then tie himself to the stack with a longish bit of dressing gown cord.

I watch him, a nagging concern forming about safety.

It starts to snow.

By now, I am extremely worried about his welfare. I leap into action, and send an email to a friend querying my legal liability should he fall off the roof.

Coffee break. I make the Cheerful Builder a mug of his favourite, and feed him mince pies. He pooh-poohs the danger. I suggest that he fills his left-hand pockets with some really heavy things, so that if he loses his footing he’ll slide down the pitched roof on the side of the soft bushes in the front garden.

The Cheerful Builder resumes his ascent.

An email from my friend. She is confident that I am not personally responsible. Whether she means ‘in the event of an accident’ or ‘just in my general life’ she does not make clear.

Short Tony appears. “You’re a couple of days early, and I don’t think much of your costume!” he shouts. He has no idea of Health and Safety. The next time he is clinging precariously to his own chimney stack, I will dress up as a clown and leap out behind him shouting ‘bang!!!’. Then he will see how dangerous misplaced humour can be.

Another email from my friend, admitting that she’s not really sure about the basis of her legal advice. I send her a stroppy reply. She responds by saying that I would be better off consulting a lawyer, rather than a recruitment consultant.

By now the snow is easing off and has turned into a sort of swirling sleety rain. I gaze up at the Cheerful Builder, plying his lonely trade up in the stratosphere, and regret including the penalty clause in our agreement (death, if he doesn’t finish by Christmas Eve).

I retire inside, to the warmth of a roaring fan heater.

I pick the wrong day to dismember the hare.

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Unfortunately, time constraints mean that if I am to make a delicious game pie for Boxing Day dinner, I am going to have to make it on the official Worst Hangover of the Year Day.

The world-famous Drummers of Burundi perform at a venue just behind my eyes.

The LTLP has already run from the kitchen clutching her mouth at the first whiff of pigeon frying. But real chefs have more grit. I stick to my task, like an Ainsley Harriot with some degree of personality.

There are two great things about wild game. The first is that it’s about as free range as free range could be. So ethically it’s an extremely good thing to eat. The second is that it’s bloody cheap (if you can’t get it free), but people think it’s really expensive. That makes it a good way of impressing – to pick somebody at complete random – a father-in-law who might inexplicably think that you are a vapid, know-nothing wastrel.

Anybody who has ever cut up a rabbit will tell you – they have an incredible amount of blood. Hares are the same. It must be something about the long floppy ears. It drips on the floor as I go to work with my knife.

I ping one of the joints out. A glollop of blood flicks across the kitchen and splotches on the work surface, like an evil Jackson Pollack.

The Burundi lads move on to a new tune – cover versions of Sabbath classics.

By the time the meat is quartered and thrown in the pan, the kitchen is starting to look like a crime scene. I gather up the packaging and the bowl of blood and gutty things, then unfortunately knock my arm against something, tipping half my payload against a kitchen unit.

It slides down the white door, gracefully.

I hurry over to the bin bag, leaving a trail as I go. The remainder goes in the bin bag. Some of it comes out the bottom again, to form a small pool.

The LTLP enters, to find me laughing maniacally, clutching a knife in blood-sodden hands.

The drummers reach a crescendo.

I go for a run.

Run! Run! Run!

Up past the village shop and down the green lane (where there has been a recent episode of dog shit).

My breathing isn’t too good, and it’s cold. A sea fret is forming about me.

A ’sea fret’ is the local name for the thick fogs that occasionally sweep in off the North Sea. They can be pretty spectacular, sometimes arriving at an incredible speed – literally billowing, like smoke.

You will often find that different regions have special local names for fog. There is a very good reason for this – ‘a sea fret’ sounds infinitely more scary and sinister than just ’some fog’. It’s a way of intimidating the townies.

I run on. It is like being a character in a James Herbert horror story. (The Fog).

This is a bit worrying. I do not wish to turn into a gibbering homicidal maniac, especially just before Christmas.

I already have a bit of a headache and a runny nose from the cold. In fact I feel a bit weird. The thing is, with the sea fret being like the horrific-makes-you-go-mad fog in the James Herbert book, I am very concerned about the placebo effect.

I am worried that I will end up being mysteriously compelled to expose myself in the village shop before murdering the LTLP and Short Tony. And then, just when I’m standing there covered in blood and dribbling, and wondering who to murder next, the police would turn up and explain that it wasn’t a sinister chemical nerve agent James Herbert fog after all, but a simple sea fret. And I will look sheepish, and feel like a bit of a fool, and at the very least I will have to write a letter of apology to the Village Shop Lady.

The air is clearer as I huff past the church, past Big A’s place with his newly-installed exterior Christmas lights and back home.

I feel out of breath. But I think I am OK this time.

Like David Davis, I feel sorry for poor Mr Blunkett.

“Politicians!” I hear you cry (over the internet). “If us private sector people were as incompetent as that lot, we’d be sacked immediately!”

Which, thinking back at the spectacular collection of fuckwitted cock-ups that were the regular milestones of my career, and that of everybody else I know in the world, doesn’t ring entirely true.

But that was it for him. One mistake and he had to go. Like that Boris Johnson, who was sacked by Mr Howard for not telling him about his blog.

If Mr Blunkett had a fault, it was that he concentrated too much on the glamour parts of his job, like prisons and tanks at Heathrow and stuff, and did fuck all about the issue of dog shit.

As regular readers know, I hate dog shit. If you offered me a choice as to whether I would want Dido rubbed into my face or dog shit, I would choose Dido every time. That’s how much I hate it. There has been another episode of dog shit in our village, and I see the politicians doing nothing.

Nothing.

I am fairly sure that compulsory ID cards for dogs would help us tackle the problem of this village being flooded with waves of dog shit. But is there a political will to do this?

Mr Clarke, are you listening?

I go to an office party!!!

This is highly exciting, as I don’t have an office now. But I was kindly invited by the company for which (grammar) I used to work.

It is in London. I walk in wonder through the brightly-lit streets like Paul Hogan on his first trip from the Outback to New York.

That’s me. I am the Norfolk Paul Hogan. Turkey Dundee.

There is a nagging doubt in my mind that my ‘nautical theme’ costume is rubbish. The Village Shop is not much good for fancy dress, so I have sellotaped a picture of a cow, a can of Fosters and a chocolate bar to a pole, and gone as a historical re-enactment of the Mutiny on the Bounty.

My other worry is that this company is now a big customer of mine, and so it would be unwise to get really drunk and start saying things I regret. Like:

“You know why I left? You’re all idiots!!! You idiotic idiots!!!”

or

“I’ve got this website…”

or

“You may well be bitter that you’re just known as ‘the Reception Girl’. But tonight – my dear – I shall make you a woman.”

My costume has a hit and miss success rate, and sooner or later somebody eats my chocolate bar thus ruining the whole concept, but generally I seem to have a good time.

I return by train to the village, hungover but energised.