Sub-prime, Northern Rock, falling house prices, high oil prices, rising food prices and a country sliding along on unsustainable levels of personal debt… There could be hard times just around the corner.

You have to note this because, in the future, we might associate any economic recession with the Great Bristol Cultural Meltdown of 2007. In truth, the disasters that overtook us were nothing whatever to do with interest rates, the stock market or any of that stuff.

To recap: we lost the IMAX cinema and Wildwalk at At-Bristol. The Old Vic closed and we have no idea when it'll open again. The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, an attraction of national importance, announced plans to move to London. The proposed Arena near Temple Meads is now not going to happen, while there are to be job losses at the BBC’s Bristol operation, mostly among makers of documentaries and at the Natural History Unit.

Then there was the Massacre of the Outdoor Events. The Flower Show, a fixture on the Downs since the 1940s, was cancelled and is unlikely to happen next year. Several other events around the area got into trouble, too, like various music festivals all the way to things like Joust!, a festival of all things medieval at Berkeley Castle which brought in literally thousands of re-enactment enthusiasts every summer.

St Pauls Carnival nearly didn't happen, being postponed from its traditional July slot to September. In the end it went ahead thanks to a superhuman effort by organisers to overcome all the elf & safety red tape that threatened to strangle this most spontaneous of community events. But it happened and it was good. Oh, it also had a lot of help from a City Council determined to avoid the humiliation of St Pauls not happening in Abolition 200 year. It was about the one humiliation the council did avoid.

And then, perhaps worst of all, the tragic, untimely and utterly undeserved death of Ashton Court Fest, a great Bristol institution. No. Sorry. Don't want to talk about it.

Whether there's a common strand running through all these disasters is hard to say. What did for the outdoor events was the weather. It pissed down all summer long (something you'll remember vividly if you're a smoker). So it wasn't simply a case of Ashton Court or the Flower Show soldiering on in the damp as they have so many times before. It was a case of them not being able to continue because the ground had been absorbing water for weeks beforehand.

At-Bristol was one of many attractions built with Lottery money for the Millennium. Like the Dome in London and many other Millennium projects around the country, it was put up without too much thought going into how its revenue would be sustained. In the end it couldn't make ends meet, but at least the excellent Explore bit of it is still running.

Of course, the government has always regarded the Lottery as a convenient cash cow, which is how come obscene sums are being spunked on the 2012 Olympics. Whatever the rights (if any) and manifold wrongs of this grotesque New Labour vanity project, the fact remains that cash for arts and culture is going to be squeezed right hard in the years to come.

Bristol City Council couldn't or wouldn't pony up to keep the Empire & Commonwealth Museum here, though it might be more pertinent to say that the place was always ultimately headed for London anyway. What happens to the Old Vic is a hell of a worry. In the meantime, the council is putting a lot of eggs into the Museum of Bristol basket, with the cost having risen by almost £5m from the last estimate.

Cadbury Schweppes announced it's to close the Cadburys plant at Keynsham and move production to Poland. When this happens, it'll end 250 years' continuous history of chocolate making in the area. It started out as Fry's, a firm set up by Quakers determined to do the right thing by the workforce and the locality; they were into every local good cause going and gave away vast amounts of money to charity. Joseph Storrs Fry (1826-1913) used to visit every patient in the Bristol General Hospital (which he sponsored) each Christmas Eve. How very, very different from the greedy corporate mediocrities who rule our lives today, what?

Meanwhile, down the count's louse… Those who bothered to vote were treated to the nastiest, dirtiest and most ill-tempered local election campaign in decades. Council officers had to issue a press statement under race relations legislation saying claims in some election literature that asylum seekers “get everything handed to them on a plate” were inaccurate. Which party could they possibly have been talking about? Much of the campaign centred around the minority LibDem administration’s plans to overhaul home care for the elderly and disabled. The LibDems lost two seats and Labour are now back in charge, but are no more capable than the other lot of making home care ends meet. At the same time, plans to close council-owned residential homes for the elderly are running into predictable controversy, even though replacing them with “very sheltered” accommodation might (I only said might) be a better long-term solution.

State education in Bristol is as disappointing as ever, with both secondary and primary schools clunking along close to the bottom of national league tables for achievement. You can blame teachers, parents, the local gene pool or space aliens all you like. You can certainly partly blame a dithering educational bureaucracy hamstrung by political correctness (no-blame approach to bullying, anyone?) and sticking plaster solutions proposed by private sector consultants with no vested interest in improving things.

But any teacher will tell you the biggest difference to any kid’s school achievement comes from parental support and, in Bristol, parental support takes the form of wholesale middle-class flight. So Bristol’s newest state school, at Redland Green, is oversubscribed and has an entirely middle-class catchment area, while other secondary schools, expensively rebuilt under a secretive PFI deal that you, I and our children, dear reader, will be paying for for years to come, have empty classrooms.

Oh, and Redland Green is something like £3.5m over budget. Still, nothing’s too good for pushy parents who were mostly educated in comprehensives themselves, eh? It’s now hurting the income of Bristol’s many private schools, and so both the Cathedral School and Colston’s Girls’ School are applying to opt back into the state system as academies. The deal here is that they will take a representative cross-section of ability. But you know and I know that most applicants will come from middle-class backgrounds. Most parents in, say, Southmead or Knowle West would feel that these schools are too “posh” or “snobby” for their kids.

So, in 2007, the cultural and class divisions among Bristol’s schools got even wider. The word for this is Apartheid, only this time the biggest losers are not usually black; they’re kids on predominantly white estates around the edges of the city.

Public transport? You’re having a laugh! Well, not if you travel by train, you’re not. As widely predicted, the takeover in 2006 of local trains by the same grasping private monopoly that provides local bus services led to problems too numerous to list, including a full-scale passenger revolt in January, in which frustrated commuters between Bristol and Bath refused to pay their fares. One of First Great Western’s responses to this was to appoint a ‘Poet on the Platform’ to give daily performances at eight stations across the network.

The buses, to be honest, got just a little bit more punctual, and the recently opened Showcase 2 route from Old Market to somewhere out the far east of the city looks pretty smart. Nice buses, too. Shame so few of us can afford the fares.

There must have been some good stuff. Good stuff … Good stuff … Hmmm … Well, the big new Airbus A380 flew for the first time, which may or may not help secure a lot of jobs in Filton for years to come, though frankly the news from Airbus is always a bit of a rollercoaster. One minute they’re talking about the collapse of the dollar messing up their finances, the next minute they get a big new order from somewhere. Then they’re flogging the Filton site to some Yankee firm.

If, on the other hand, you’re the sort of person who thinks aeroplanes are bad, there was also cheering news in the continuing campaign against Bristol Airport getting bigger. The airport announced its expansion blueprint two years ago, but has yet to submit planning applications to North Somerset Council, almost certainly because of furious campaigning by local residents and environmentalists.

There was Abolition 200, a large and diffuse series of events, some of them dead good, to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Nobody seriously expected Nelson Mandela to take up the invitation, but at the very least it made a few Bristolians conscious that abolition was not merely the work of kindly rich white liberals; slave revolt played a big part in it, too.

Mind you, it looks as though the Colston Hall will continue to make a us a laughing-stock in the wider world by being named after a slave trader. Even though its expansion and refurb is an excellent opportunity for a re-naming. C'mon, council people! There's important work for expensive marketing and branding consultants here! Oh, and we got dead excited when Prince Harry was spotted partying in Bristol. We assumed this was a prelude of gilded glamour to come as Chelsy would take a postgrad degree at Bristol Uni. In the event, she chose Leeds instead, which you might consider a good thing, though as far as the local media was concerned it was a disaster. The Post missed out on lots of no-brain stories and pictures, and Venue missed out on loads of no-brain cheap sneering.

No, no, of course, there were good things. The Watershed secured the cash to buy the building, put itself on a secure footing as it marked its 25th birthday and has a revenue stream which will support new media and creative industries for years to come. So that's good. Venue was 25 as well. That's good, too. Bradley Stoke held its second-ever community festival. That was good. We're having lots of quite intelligent debate about rubbish and recycling (whoever knew about cornstarch bags before this summer?) and that's all good.

Peter Hargreaves and Steve Lansdown floated their investment firm (Hargreaves-Lansdown, since you ask) on the stock market, netting themselves £80m apiece and making millionaires of 20 senior employees. Lansdown is also chair of Bristol City FC, who are also good news. Under the management of Gary Johnson, City are having a great run and are confidently talking about building a big new stadium in quite a sensible location. Gates are up, the fair-weather supporters are flooding back and we feel sure that even supporters of Bristol Rovers are thrilled that their traditional friendly rivals are doing so well.

So force a smile and cheer on the Robins, or the Pirates or the Shit, or whatever they're called. But someone please sort out the cultural, intellectual and festival-al life of Bristol as a matter of some urgency. This isn’t just about building the good society, or because music and art and stuff are good in themselves. No, it's also because any minute now, a lot of educated, talented and economically productive people are going to realise that they might as well be living in Milton Keynes. Which also has better schools.

Meanwhile, here are the rest of the year's headlines:

Cigarettes: they're the new heroin, you know.

- Celebrity architect, civic visionary and Tobacco Factory boss George Ferguson banned patio heaters from his venue as they're environmentally insane. Smokers can instead make use of the venue's supply of woollen blankets, making them look even more like the broken, pathetic, defeated wretches they are.
- Some bloke was going around Yeovil pretending to be a council enforcement officer and demanding £50 on-the-spot fines for dropping cigarette ends. He stopped one woman, told her she was fined £50 and marched her to the cashie to withdraw the money and told her to phone the local council offices to get a receipt! Why didn't I think of that?
- Some people are desperate addicts. You take Orange, the mobile phone people, who are in the grip of a terrible addiction to free publicity. So in the Silly Season they produced one of those back-of-fag-packet “surveys” claiming that smokers were taking advantage of the ban to send text messages whenever they slip out of the office or pub for a smoke. Smoking and texting, all mixed up - smexting, they call it.
- Smokers’ rights campaigners held a protest march through Bristol in the autumn, after similar marches in Wells and Glastonbury in the summer. The 200 protestors marched down Park Street, rather than up it, presumably so's they wouldn't be too out of breath by the end of it.

Food: it's the new cigarettes, you know.

- The Childhood Obesity Clinic at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children has been reporting some success with 120 clients/patients/whatever the non-judgemental word is using a mandometer. This is a gizmo that the young porkers put under their plates and keeps asking them whether they feel full up yet.
- According to the British Obesity Surgery Patients Association, some obese individuals have actually been deliberately putting on weight to qualify for free gutbucket surgery on the NHS. The government guidelines say anyone with a body mass index (BMI) over 35 should get an op, but some local health trusts, including Somerset, have raised the qualifying BMI to 45 because there's so many fatties and they can't cope with demand. Fancy a curry?
- According to NHS figures this year, almost one Bristol youngster in 10 is obese before they've even started school, and it’s one in seven by the time they finish. So, obviously, going to school makes you fat.
- Scientists at Bath and Bristol Universities announced research results using figures from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (aka ALSPAC, alias ‘Children of the 90s’) and concluded that 15 minutes’ moderate exercise a day lowers a child’s chances of being obese by almost 50%. Blimey! Who'd have thought it?
- Great Western Ambulance Trust announced it’s to buy three new special ‘bariatric’ ambulances, specially strengthened to carry patients weighing up to 55 stone. At £100,000 a time, they cost about the same as regular ambulances.

Signs o' the times

- “The green bin is only for paper, plastic, cardboard, tins and cans - not a final resting place,” said a council spokesman in Exeter after the ashes of a woman (urn, nameplate and all) were found dumped in a green recycling bin. Fortunately, staff at the recycling centre spotted it in time as it moved along the conveyor belt to the composter.
- Bristol beauty salon chain Beautology is offering a service for those who'd like to have the hair in their pants match the colour of the hair on top of their heads.
- Wet summer weather led to a minor drop in house burglaries in Bath. People weren't leaving doors and windows open as much as they would normally do at that time of year.
- Christopher Reynolds, 30, doesn’t own a car, has never owned a car, hasn’t driven a car for 10 years AND for the last four years he’s lived in Munich. Yet he got a ticket for speeding on the A370 at Uphill near Weston-super-Mare.
- Bristol Airport and Avon & Somerset police recruited plane-spotters to double up as terrorist spotters. Plane-spotters are often the first to notice anything unusual going on at an airport, and the cops and airport staff can’t be everywhere, hence the Airport Watch scheme.
- Local schoolchildren were downloading the high-frequency noise emitted by the 'mosquito' device normally used by supermarkets and convenience stores to stop teenagers hanging around. The tone is inaudible to most older people but youngsters find it intensely annoying, so kids were downloading it as a mobile phone ringtone to annoy their classmates without the teachers noticing.
- A group of firefighters were disciplined for driving their appliance past, and shining torches at, a group of gay men allegedly having sex on the Downs one evening. For this they were fined £1,000 each, some were reduced in rank and all had to attend a two-day equality conference as well. Political correctness gone mad said everyone, but Avon Fire & Rescue service boss Kevin Pearson said it was all misreported as a result of society's “hysterical homophobia”. The men themselves have not been permitted to talk to the press.

Hero(in)es…

- Company director Phyllis Self has run a gardening business in Bristol and Wiltshire since 1974, works a 48-hour week, takes charge of a lot of the accounts and paperwork, and employs a workforce of nearly 200. She turns up for work every day at the Whitehall Garden Centre in Whitchurch, and among the correspondence back in September was a telegram from the Queen congratulating her on her 100th birthday.
- A petrol station cashier told Gloucester Crown Court how, when faced with a robber armed with what turned out to be an air pistol, she refused to hand the money over. “I just got on with it - British people don't stop work just because someone is trying to bully us with guns... I was going to thump him, but I thought twice, because it may well have been a real gun.”
- Harry Patch! I mean, Harry Patch! Woo! What a geezer! True blue hero. The WW1 veteran, Wells resident and second oldest man in Britain celebrated his 109th birthday, visited the battlefield of Passchendaele, published his autobiography (‘The Last Fighting Tommy’), repeatedly told interviewers that no damn war ever did any damn good, and was taken on as an agony uncle by lad-mag FHM. Harry's debut column advised a reader that he didn’t have to go anywhere foreign to have a nice holiday.
- Unemployed Steve Mould, 53, of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, was voted the UK's laziest man in a poll a few years back for such exploits as only washing twice a week and sleeping in the pub because he can't be bothered to walk home. Earlier this year he was in the Berkeley Arms Hotel when a gent started choking on a piece of meat. Mould leapt into action and performed a successful Heimlich manoeuvre on John Berkeley, as in Berkeley Castle, as in the village of Berkeley. The local squire later showed his gratitude by buying Mr Mould a drink.

I see you're a simpleton ...

- In the autumn, a Citroen Xsara was spotted heading north from Bristol towards Gloucester on the M5 with a mattress on top. With the driver using one hand to hold it in place.
- Bus company Stagecoach apologised after leaving a dummy bomb on one of their vehicles after police carried out a controlled explosion on the suspicious package in Cheltenham High Street. The bomb was part of a staff training exercise, but had been left there when the bus was urgently called away to carry real passengers.
- Berlin police officer Josef Cene, 38, took his Fiat Punto out of the car park one evening at Honeystreet, Wiltshire, indicated right, looked both ways, and drove into the Kennett & Avon Canal. He apparently mistook the canal at night to be a wet tarmac road, allowing the press to run lines like VORSPRUNG A LEAK and “eye-witnesses dialled nein, nein, nein”. Herr Cene had reportedly been visiting the areas to meet fellow crop circle enthusiasts.
- Jacob Rees-Mogg, Old Etonian and prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for the new constituency of North East Somerset, got married. Rees-Mogg, who famously suggested that parliamentary candidates who hadn't had a decent education were no better than potted plants, married heiress Helena de Chair, with a Latin mass at Canterbury Cathedral. One of the witnesses was Jacob’s nanny, Veronica Crook, who had accompanied him in a vintage Bentley during his unsuccessful attempt to get elected in Fife Central. At the reception, Jacob's speech ended, apparently, with him yelling: “Lefties, get out!”
- Bristol-based supermarket chain Somerfield issued a press release saying “Brits will... be enjoying over 3.5 eggs each over the Easter weekend alone. But over a quarter don't know why handing them out symbolises the birth of Jesus.” This was later revised to ‘rebirth’ of Jesus and, finally, following consultation with the Church of England, ‘resurrection’ of Jesus.
- Paul Potts, singing bloke, won a TV talent contest and became a hot commercial property in an industry which, despite the internet and file-sharing and everything else, persists in treating the public as though they're idiots. Come to think of it, any able-bodied person under the age of 75 watching primetime TV on a Saturday night probably is an idiot. Anyhoo, Potts’s PR minders spun us this delightful story of desperately shy, gauche school bullying victim rising from total obscurity to living the dream. No room to mention the fact that painfully shy Potts spent seven years as a Liberal Democrat on Bristol City Council, then.

Love. In all its different forms.

- Sir Benjamin Slade, owner of a 13th-century country house in Somerset, had trouble with a peacock with a fetish for cars doing serious damage to a Lexus belonging to one of his staff. There are now signs warning visitors of the danger posed to their vehicles by the peacock. “Because the car was peacock blue, I can only assume he is attracted to men,” said Sir Benjamin. “If it had been a brown car, we could assume he was looking for a peahen… I’m considering having him put on the sex offenders’ register.”
- Meanwhile, Sir Benjamin was also hoping to hire out his dog Jasper (with a diamond-studded choker) to be best man at civil ceremonies. He said: “Jasper is absolutely perfect for the role. For one thing, he is gay himself. He may also appeal to the more cosmopolitan among potential same-sex suitors as he is anti-hunting, a pacifist and probably supports New Labour. Another thing is that he has been castrated.”
- According to tabloid newspaper reports, a bizarre new sex craze known as “furring” is sweeping the West Country. It’s like dogging, only you have to wear a giant animal costume. One fancy dress hire shop owner said: “Some of my animal fur suits come back in a right state. The most popular are Sylvester the Cat and Looney Tunes characters.”
- A Cheltenham businessman has started a service enabling lovers to literally join the Mile High Club and do the deed over some of the West Country’s top beauty spots.
- Chris Donald, who, according to the red tops, lives “somewhere in the West Country”, closed down his car-sex blog after it was featured in The Sun. Donald, 38, claims to have had sex with over 30 cars, two motor boats and a jet ski. He works as a mechanic and has a specially modified garage in his home with carpets and heating where he can, er, service them. He has met several like-minded people on the internet, some of whom have brought cars to his home. He was last heard of trying to arrange to meet the owners of a JCB and/or 44-tonne articulated truck.
- The Wildlife and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge announced that Carlos and Fernando, Britain's only gay flamingos in a steady relationship, have become surrogate parents.
- Bath-based mail order sex toy firm Lovehoney launched Vortex Vibrations, “an innovative new attachment that transforms a household vacuum cleaner into a source of exquisite pleasure for women”. Oh, really! There are plenty of chaps I know who say they're also a source of exquisite pleasure for women, and are slightly cheaper. Though a few of them do admittedly need plugging into the mains.

Headlines of the Year

Horses Saved Me From Life Of Crime
- Evening Post, Jan

Mourners Terrified By Ostrich
- South West News, Feb. An ostrich was hanging around a Cornwall graveyard.

Discovery Of Chemical Profiles For Infectious Diarrhoea
- Bristol University Press Release, Feb. Yeah, that's a story we'd all really want to follow up...

Crash Driver Denies Eating Salami
- Evening Post, April

Hitler's Face Found In Cinderford
- Gloucestershire police press release about graffiti, April

Group Plans Next Meeting
- Bath Chronicle, May. Excitement too much for ya?

Council Looks At Road
- Bristol Evening Post, May. Hold the front page...

Eagle Owls Shut Paths
- Western Daily Press, May. Don’t you hate it when they do that?

St John Ambulance Treats 42 Cheese Roll Injuries
- St John Ambulance press release, June. That's injuries arising from the annual cheese-rolling contest at Brockworth, Glos.

Justice For Nuclear Guinea Pigs
- Western Daily Press, June

Swearing Train Driver Fights Sack
- Evening Post, June

79% Of People In The South West Prefer Sensitive Hair Colourants
- Press release from some natural hair dye firm. Well done, the 21% who actively expressed a preference for harsh chemicals.

Celebrity Corpses Are Taking Centre Stage, Says Academic
- Press release from Bath University, hosting a conference on death and dying.

UWE Academic Takes Part In Online Stuttering Conference
- UWE press release, Sept

Wife Took In Her Washing As Adulterous Judge Burnt To Death In The Garden Shed
- The Times, Oct, re: the case of the Somerset judge who died in a fire just after telling his wife he was leaving her.