Review of 2002

YEARS ARE like pipes – you can look back at them, up them, down them orĀ  along them but you can’t change the crap that was in them. And as I always say, if it’s true in plumbing then it’s true in life.

In January, Johnny Foreigner and his continental cousins threw away their money and started spending this new Euro thingy instead. Quite right too, I say. If we have to go to their hot and smelly countries on holiday then there’s less chance of us being confused by all the different funny money they used to have. Just don’t try the same with the pound, Johnny!

Then in February, the nation was gripped by curlers for the first time since Hilda Ogden went to that great corner shop in the sky. If only Rhona Martin hadn’t looked like Lily Savage’s harder sister then she’d have made a fortune.

All in all, 2002 was a good year to be a friend of Dorothy. Paul Burrell didn’t get knicked for thieving Diana’s gear, Will Young had his first number one and Michael Barrymore learned to swim. Sadly, it was the year of the queens but not the Queen’s year.

After 50 years on the throne (a plumber’s nightmare if ever I heard one) her Maj and the rest of the nation were in mourning in March for the dear old, darling Queen Mum, cruelly taken from us in her prime. Never again will those lovely yellow teeth light up our lives. Never again will the smell of
stale biscuits waft down the Mall in the morning. It was the annus horribilus to end all annuses. Oh and Princess Margaret died too.

In April Little Lord Beckham broke a bone in his foot and suddenly the metatarsal was the country’s most famous bone since Linford Christie retired. There is clearly some link between bones, dogs and South Korea that runs alongside metatarsal, Victoria Beckham and the World Cup but it’s beyond me.

In May, Roy Keane left the Irish World Cup camp in the huff. It left Mick McCarthy without a pyschotic, leg-breaking midfielder but he failed in a last gasp bid to call up Martin McGuinness as a replacement. By June the World Cup and the Jubilee were in full swing and flags of St George were
selling like pillow cases at a Ku Klux Klan convention.

In July a man waved a fake gun at Hear’Say at a motorway service station. Fake pop band, fake gun, seems fair enough. Next thing you know someone will be waving an arse at Robbie Williams.

Guns were in the news again in August and September when America was terrorised by the Washington sniper, or George W Bush as he is known. George has disproved the myth that any American boy can grow up to be President. Now you don’t even have to grow up.

One of the most tragic moments of the year was in October when 128 people died after the siege of a Moscow theatre. The biggest tragedy was that Will and Gareth hadn’t been on a tour of eastern Europe at the time.

In November our brave, heroic firefighters bravely and heroically laid down their poker hands to stand bravely and heroically on the picket line to demand a 40 per cent pay rise, a new cue for the pool table and an ACAS agreement on whether one-eyed jacks should count as floaters.

In December Cherie Blair got into bother over her involvement with a lying conman. She was also in trouble for her relationship with Australian fraudster Peter Foster. Lady Macbeth was also shocked by reports that Osama bin Laden wore a Cherie Blair mask for Halloween.

When we look back on 2002 and remember floods and fires, lost jobs and lost Royals, we shouldn’t be too gloomy. Don’t think of 2002 as the year of economic and environmental disasters, instead remember it as the year Jeffrey Archer spent in jail. Wasn’t so bad after all, was it?

Plumb on

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