For Bristol signs o'the times, you couldn't possibly make up anything better than Cherie Blair and her flats.

You remember - in 2002, Cherie joined the property bubble which did so much to define the New Labour era. She needed a pad for young Euan, leaving home for the first time (sniff!) to study (sob!) at Bristol University (sniffle! Pass me another onion!)

While she was about it, she thought she'd have another flat as well to rent out. Trouble was, the deal was done for her by Peter Foster, a convicted con-man who was, at the time, the boyfriend of her "life coach" Carole Caplin.

It got Cherie into all manner of trouble, culminating in a press conference at which she turned on the waterworks about her eldest boy leaving the family nest in the hope we'd all feel some sympathy.

Oh, but it gets better. You see, those flats in Clifton were brought to you by Edward Ware Homes. If anyone was the poster-boy for Bristol's yuppy flat boom it was local lad Eddie Ware. He built flats all over the place, fighting several planning battles with local residents. In August this year, it was announced that his firm was insolvent, with debts of over £5m.

Meanwhile, Cherie reportedly sold the flats a couple of months ago for not much more than she paid for them. Possibly less.

And so we allowed the city skyline to be transformed by Eddie Ware and his ilk, building ever more absurd "apartments" for a gracious modern inner-city lifestyle, except that loads of them were always empty because there's a limited supply of folks willing or able to live in places like that.

So there is an upside to recession. Ten years of clueless, debt-sodden consumerism and property speculation hit the buffers. Aside from the unemployment, what's not to love? We consume less, waste less, drive less and now get a breathing space in which we can try and reclaim our communities.

Many land-grabs hanging over various neighbourhoods will now be on ice for a few years because developers ain't developing. So regardless of the outcome of the bid to turn Castle Park into a town green, the disgraceful attempt to snaffle part of it for a development on the St Mary le Port site is liable to be put back.

The biggest land-grab story of this year, though, was not about private developers, but local authorities' transport plans. Proposals to run a Bus Rapid Transit system along part of the Bristol to Bath Railway Path proved an annexation too far and hundreds turned out to protest and deluge councillors and MPs with objections. Bristol City Council, at least, has sort of backed off for now, but the proposals are not as "shelved" and some would have you believe.

The campaign to save the Railway Path also marked the point at which "citizen journalism" came of age in Bristol. There have been local blogs and "alternative" local news websites around for years, but 2008 was the year in which we suddenly found there were a few of them actually worth looking at.

The Bristol Blogger, James Barlow, Vowles the Green, the Green Bristol Blog (the links are over there) and some others don't just peck away at their keyboards complaining. They find stuff out as well sometimes, and made a lot of the running in the Railway Path campaign and on a couple of other issues.

Meanwhile, old-school media are suffering. Commercial radio, the local papers and the local telly across the UK are losing readers, listeners and lookers - and advertising revenue - in a new world of multi-channel telly and the internet. The biggest casualty this year was ITV West, laying off journalists and making swingeing cuts to its local news coverage.

Unemployed journalists often take the time-honoured route of crossing over to the Dark Side. According to a survey which I have just made up (but am prepared to bet money on), there are now more people working in public relations in Bristol than there are actual journalists.

... But the death of old media can be greatly exaggerated. The Evening Post still leads the news agenda in this town, and still delivers the occasional great scoop. Like the time they uncovered the fact that the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) spent nearly a million quid - of your money! - on public relations last year, including £11,000 a month to one Bristol PR company alone. Heaven alone knows how giving all this cash to people who don't do anything of any use whatsoever to the public represents any kind of value to the taxpayer.

But the people most in need of work in Bristol right now are builders. They have been the first casualties of the downturn. The irony is that if you're in the building trade, then SWRDA and the rest of the public sector are the best hopes you have for paying your own mortgage in the coming years.

There's the Hengrove redevelopment, major overhauls of the BRI and Southmead hospitals, and all manner of transport infrastructure from bus lanes to park 'n' rides. Building work on the new Museum of Bristol continues, though the private development on land behind the site which was supposed to pay for some of this £25m project no longer has a developer. Bristol City Council is also to spend millions on important maintenance work on the floating harbour to stop all the water running out and Bristol falling into a big hole. And there's loads of money - over £20m - going to be spent on turning Bristol into England's showcase Cycling City.

Let's not get too worked up about Cycling City, the residents' parking zones and all the rest and the culture wars between drivers and cyclists and residents and commuters. It's interesting to note, though, that most political argument in Bristol is not about money and resources, but about the control and use of public space. One of the bitterest arguments this summer was the moronic outrage on the letters pages and web forums that greeted Cllr Mark Bradshaw's blindingly obvious point that people do not "own" the public highway outside their houses and have no automatic right to park a car there.

This was the year in which all manner of fixes for Bristol's secondary education system finally took shape. Schools are still being re-built under lavish PFI arrangements, two private schools were turned to academies, while other challenging state schools were also academised.

The betting is that next year at least one of these academies will be revealed to have significant problems, but for now there's a tentative feeling that secondary education in Bristol is turning a corner, if only because so much of it is now beyond the dead hand of the City Council and its red tape and parasitic consultants.

Of course the biggest building development in years threw open its portals in the autumn. Nothing in Bristol came as close to generating as much hot air from several different directions as the spanking new £500m shopping development that has transformed half of old Broadmead.

On one side, the local media reacted with absurd hysteria. This was the most exciting and important thing to happen to Bristol since VE day as Harvey Nic's and lots of other posh frock shops and a couple of restaurants, plus the usual chainstore fascias opened up in town. Probably the lowest point here was when the BBC even offered space on its website for the manager of one of these shops to blog about how excited she was about opening a shop selling frocks.

At the opposite end of the argument, the usual lefties, greenies, anarchists, and dolphin-shaggers reacted with self-righteous outrage to this ghastly cathedral of consumerism, which really shouldn't be blighting dear old Broadmead at the time when global warming and world poverty ... (etc. fill in the rest yourself.) Some even took to the streets as zombies, to make some sort of point to the thousands of bemused shoppers. Carboot Circus, they called it.

People, people ... It's just a bunch of shops, OK? It employs three or four thousand people and it got Bristol's name in all the national papers for a day or two. Let's get over it and move on.

We made even more national headlines with the arrest of student Andrew Ibrahim on suspicion of planning some manner of terrorist outrage from a drab little house in a nondescript 1980s estate in north Bristol. Ibrahim and an alleged accomplice are due to stand trial in the new year.

But it wasn't all bad. Bristol won loads of awards for being green and sustainable and generally excellent. The fact that most of them came from organisations you've never heard of is neither here nor there. Everyone says Bristol rocks, and that should be good enuff.

Other good things ... UWE's wonderful Ulink bus service is starting to give those FarceBus bastards a run for their money (and they're cheaper!). Someone should give them an honorary degree ... It looks as though the Old Vic has not only been saved, but will rise even better from the ashes. So that's good, then ... Somerfield, which many would argue runs the world's worst supermarkets from its Bristol HQ, got taken over by the Co-Op, so we can expect Somerfield stores to get better. So that's good ... The amount of domestic waste Bristol is recycling has increased from 10% to over 40% in the last two years. That's good, too.

The goodest thing of all was Bristol City FC, which played a football match. Had they won, City would have been promoted to the Premiership, which would have been good. But that would have hurt the feelings of their friendly rivals Bristol Rovers, so it's equally good that they lost. Everyone's happy.

City (who are planning a nice new stadium, therefore more building work, which is also good) have achieved the best run of any local footballing team in a century. And they've done this without the involvement of any ghastly Russian oligarchs, Arab oil magnate or Icelandic bankers. It has been done with Gary Johnson's management, and a few quid from owner Steve Lansdown, half of local finance firm made good Hargreaves Lansdown. That's something to be rather proud of, really.

2008 IN LISTS

SIGNS O' THE TIMES

A Bristol firm, Handbags from Heaven, doesn't sell monstrously expensive designer handbags. It simply hires them out. Chloe, Prada, Gucci ... Oh, and they even do handbag hire gift vouchers.

Intelligent Processing Services Ltd announced it was to close its Bristol site at Aztec West, with the loss of 100 jobs. They process cheques for the big banks, but now most of us hardly ever use cheques anymore.

Thefts of metal from places like church roofs, school buildings and statues shot up fivefold in Avon & Somerset last year, due to growing global demand for scrap metal. A man was done at Bristol Crown Court for using a crane and five trucks to lift 171 tonnes of steel railway lines from the main Bristol to London line near Chipping Sodbury.

Rob McCaffrey, 50, from Gloucester, announced he was quitting his pastime of 40 years because he was fed up with being branded a terrorist and/or paedophile. Mr McCaffrey is a bus-spotter who has travelled the world to photograph buses. But only in the UK has he been stopped by police and been abused by people suspicious of his motives.

It was a vintage year for UFO sightings ... An RAF helicopter chased a strange flying thing across the Bristol Channel from South Wales, but gave up on running low on fuel. Other sightings included a glowing disc reported over the M5 near Weston-super-Mare (it was near junction 21), and 12 orange balls in the sky over Basingstoke. In the summer, huge numbers of people reported seeing red lights in the sky all over Bristol. They were actually Thai sky lanterns, which are all the rage at weddings and parties at the moment. A local UFO "expert" was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying the aliens are visiting more often because they're concerned about global warming.

FAREWELL TO ...

Clifton organic supermarket Fresh & Wild, purveyors of pricey and not-very-local produce to overpaid singletons.

Bristol Palin. The redneck teenage mom who nearly ruined us. Now fuck off back to the frozen wastes with your vile know-nothing Mom and never blacken our Google ranking again.

Much-loved jazz musician, columnist and broadcaster Miles Kington died aged 66. Kington, a regular contributor to The Times and the Independent, lived in Limpley Stoke. His newspaper columns regularly satirised people, places and local government in Bath. He was also a regular fixture at charity events in the city.

Long-standing Bristolian Socialist Party member Colin Toogood, renowned for wearing a black leather thong in public, died aged 53.

Bristol's Girlband split up only days after they fell out of some TV talent programme and shortly before the charity single they feature on went to number one.

Crowd-freezing. It was the new flash-mobbing for ten minutes back there. Some 200 people wandering around Bath Abbey 'froze' for five minutes one day back there. Just stood stock-still, while the results, and all the other bemused punters wandering past them, were filmed for YouTube. Thankfully, it didn't catch on. Now... Who's for a Rickrolling?

COO! I NEVER KNEW THAT!

Britain's biggest pawnbrokers has its HQ in Bristol. Albemarle & Bond announced that their annual profit was £46.9m, a rise of 49% on last year. This credit crunch is great for business.

Jean-Michel Jarre bought his first ever synthesiser in Bristol during the late 1960s. In an interview with the Daily Mail, he said (in a French accent): "To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius."

Apparently, chicken in a basket was invented at the Mill pub at Withington in the Cotswolds in the 1960s. This nugget (sorry) was uncovered by the BBC when one of the pub's long-standing punters complained that the brewery had taken it off the menu.

"THIS IS OUR 9/11"

Q. What's got 100 legs and stands on Weston beach smoking?
A. Fifty firemen who arrived after the pier burnt down.

The most dramatic thing to happen in Weston ever prompted all manner of comments, some rather unfortunate, including the the GWR presenter who allegedly said: "Everyone here - much like the pier itself - is totally gutted."

Comments on various local web forums included

I is well sad, I used to show people my starfish under the pier
- Wayne Kerr, Weston, on www.thisisbristol.co.uk

I'm really upset about this. I'd just put my washing out and now it all stinks of smoke!
- Ada Silkworm, Weston, on www.thisisbristol.co.uk

I'm sure like Windsor castle it can and must be rebuilt
- Rob, Chesham on the Daily Mail website

yes the pier is lovelly... well not exzacly anymore i like it when its not on fire
- Kate, on www.bbc.co.uk

This is our 9/11.
- Shawn, on www.bbc.co.uk

ANIMAL MAGIC

Ornithologists in Somerset were very excited at the birth of the first ever cattle egret to be hatched in Britain. The birds are a species of heron and are more commonly seen perching on the backs of cattle in Africa. It prompted at least one paper to run the headline: EGRETS - WE'VE HAD A FEW!

Otters have returned to the waterways in the centre of Bristol! BBC wildlife cameraman Richard Taylor-Jones got some footage of an otter close to the end of the M32. Wildlife experts say that cleaner rivers mean the animals are more likely to return to city centres.

A baby aye-aye was born at Bristol Zoo. They called him Razafindranriatsimaniry. It's a Malagasy name meaning Son Of A Prince Or Nobleman Who Envies Nobody. 'Raz' for short.

Two gibbons at Bristol Zoo, Duana (7) and Samuel (11) were shagging so noisily every night that environmental health officers ordered the Zoo to get them to shut the hell up. "There was no one supervising them after 6pm," fumed one resident (how does one supervise gibbons shagging?). The amorous gibbons are now subject to a curfew.

The bird-watching fraternity round these parts was all a-flutter at the arrival of an eagle owl in Clifton, just like the one in Harry Potter. This is the biggest type of owl in the world, weight of four kilos and a wingspan of up to two metres, and was residing at Woodland Road, conveniently across the street from Bristol Uni's school of Biological Sciences.

A new breed of 'super-rats' who can't be done in by the usual poison may have arrived. A survey of dead rats collected in Swindon and Bristol shows that some have a mutant gene which may confer resistance to rat poison. They've never been spotted this far west before.

THE YEAR IN FIGURES 

Some 155 pupils in the Bristol area were reported absent from school without explanation; some may have been victims of forced marriage.

Bristolians receive more than 40m junk mail items a year and collectively waste 338,866 hours annually opening junk mail and/or throwing it away.

A total of 109,126 working days were lost at Bristol City Council in the last financial year, with around 12,000 of these being due to stress.

The Bristol region has Britain's highest concentration of people working from home according to research for the TUC, with almost 16% of working age people in Bristol, Bath and surrounding areas based at, or usually working from, home.

If you wanted to buy all the houses in Bristol this summer it would have cost you £76.22 billion, according to a property firm which claimed the value of homes in Britain has fallen from £6.1 trillion in September 2007 to £5.836tn, and was falling by £1bn a day.

Bristol City Council collected £8.5m in parking charges in 2007, while B&NES netted £8.8m.

There are about 5,000 people in Bristol who are so fat that they qualify for NHS surgery, but Southmead hospital, where the procedures are carried out, can only accommodate 100 patients a year. Obesity is costing every person in the former Avon area the equivalent of £261 a year, according to figures from the Department of Health.

Bristol Primary Care Trust had 2,302 hospital admissions for alcohol-related conditions in 2007. Health professionals and addiction workers warned that over 50,000 Bristolians drink too much.

Bristol is tops for licence-dodging. Figures from TV Licensing show 5,658 Bristolians were caught licence-dodging in 2007, putting Bristol eighth in the national league table of licence-dodging.

HEADLINES OF THE YEAR

NINE YEAR OLD BALANCES SPOONS ON FACE
- South West News & Picture Agency, 24 Jan

BADGER GETS AN ASBO FOR LETTING SHEEP RUN WILD THROUGH VILLAGE
- Western Daily Press, 31 Jan

COLOMBIAN SOLD FISH NOT DRUGS
- Evening Post, 19 Feb.

THANKS FOR THE TEETH (THAT SAVED THE WORLD)
- Western Daily Press, 21 Feb. (A letter from Sir Winston Churchill about his dentures was to be auctioned.)

SHOP BOSS IS CLEARED OF TROUSER ALLEGATION
- E. Post, 28 Feb

JET SKI JESTER IN PANTS BEAT ME UP
- Western Daily Press, 27 Feb

KENNETH, 84, WAITS HOUR FOR BUS IN COLD
- E. Post, 8 Mar

VERDICTLOOMSIN GIPSYWRANGLE
- WDP, 13 Mar. Wasn't he a hobbit character in 'Lord of the Rings'?

GRAVEDIGGING BADGERS ON THE RAMPAGE
- Western Daily Press, 25 March

JESUS JOINS THE BBC
- Western Daily Press, 7 April

INADVERTENT ADMINISTRATION OF OLBAS OIL INTO THE EYE: A SURPRISINGLY FREQUENT PRESENTATION
- Bristol medics contribute to 'Eye' (journal of the Royal College of Opthalmologists). We read all the medical journals, you know.

HOW COULD THEY NOT SEE A HANDBAG STUCK IN MY GIRL'S THROAT?
- Western Daily Press, April 17

GIRAFFE'S TONGUE DESTROYS WEBCAM
- BBC Bristol website, 25 April

SURPRISE LURKING IN MAN'S GRAPES
- Western Daily Press, 14 May (It was a tarantula.)

CAGE WRESTLING PLAN FOR BATH LIBRARY
- www.thisisbath.co.uk, 26 June. No, really. It's to pull the punters in for National Year of Reading.

BRISTOL CHARITY CALLS FOR GREATER SUPPORT FOR SPLITTING UP FAMILIES
- Press release from Parentline Plus

BRISTOL SCIENTISTS PROMISE NOT TO DESTROY THE EARTH
- Evening Post, 10 Sept

EURO PARLIAMENT ROOF COLLAPSE COULD HAVE HIT TORY
- Evening Post, 22 Sept

DOG GONE: PUBLIC LECTURE TO EXPLORE DEAD PETS IN CYBERSPACE
- Bath University press release, 8 October

CROUCHING DRIVER, HIDDEN CLAMPERS
- Western Daily Press, 14 Oct

PILFERING POSTIE CAUGHT WEARING STOLEN THONG
- Western Daily Press, 18 Oct

BANK WORKER TURNED BRISTOL MAN INTO UGANDAN DIVORCEE
- Bristol Evening Post, 28 Oct

LAURA NORDER

Three Gwent police officers resigned and two were fined over a little game they played - to see who could travel furthest from the station at which they were based. Some of them made it to Barry Island and Porthcawl, but then - allegedly - some of them got a little too ambitious and their car broke down near Weston-super-Mare.

"There were bewildered and grovelling policemen down wandering through the site all day," said a worker at ECT Recycling at Avonmouth, Apparently someone from Avon & Somerset's finest allowed two BB guns which looked just like proper handguns, get into the recycling bin.

Judge Julian Lambert, on fining Yate businessman Martyn Davies £250 after police found a stash of illegal body-building drugs in his garage: "They are idiot tablets for idiots. They do nothing at all but pump you full of chemicals. No more pills for you. Off you go."

"Fuck off! This is police business," said PC Aqil Farooq when confronted by Andrew Carter, a self-employed Bristol plumber who, having spotted a police van reversing up a one-way street photographed it in flagrante and told its occupants that they were breaking the law. Having knocked the camera from his hands, Farooq - who claims that he and his colleague were reversing towards a chip shop on police business - arrested Carter for assault, resisting arrest and being drunk and disorderly. This resulted in a five-hour stay in the cells and Carter being bailed for a week before all charges against him were dropped. The police later apologised to the vigilant plumber and launched a disciplinary enquiry.

Not Proper Emergency calls received by local 999 staff included: A woman who couldn't peel the potatoes because she'd lost her glasses, the student who wanted to know when the internet was invented, and a grey squirrel with no hazelnut trees. Avon & Somerset police reported 415 outright hoax calls in the year to July 2008, almost half of them from Bristol.

Aaron Evans, 21, was sent down for seven months by Bristol magistrates after pleading guilty to theft and asking for ten other offences to be taken into consideration. He broke into a car at the NCP car park in Bristol's Trenchard Street, not realising it was a police 'covert capture' car deliberately left there to entrap habitual criminals. Evans had the satnav away, not realising he was being filmed by hidden cameras. He made it even easier for the cops as he's got his name and his date of birth tattooed on his neck. Earlier in the year, James Milsom was nicked after being caught on CCTV nicking a satnav from an undercover police car - for the third time in four months.

ANOTHER GREAT YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WORST GROUP

Commuters at several towns in the Bristol/Bath area joined a fare strike in January against overcrowding and unreliability of First Great Western's rail services.

Consumer group Passenger Focus polled 50,000 people across the UK and found that First Great Western was easily the least popular rail firm in Britain. Ticket prices, delays and the state of the toilets were the biggest passenger complaints.

First Bus in Bristol announced that change tickets could no longer be used to pay future fares. The tickets, issued when drivers do not have the right change, must now be redeemed within seven days at First's shop on Colston Avenue, or at the Marlborough Street bus station. First claimed the move was not cynical profiteering (how many punters are going to travel to either office to reclaim 10p or 20p?) but because it said it was losing £40,000 a year to change ticket forgeries. It later relented slightly and said customers have two weeks to redeem their tickets.

First sent Avon & Somerset Police a bill for £125,000 for CCTV camera footage from buses as part of the investigation into Andrew Ibrahim, the Bristolian charged with terrorist offences.

This summer's bus fare rise was, said First, due to the soaring price of oil. Now that the price of oil has come down so much, will the fares be going down again? Well will they?

HEROES

David Cemlyn, 66, went on hunger strike and chained himself to one of the Victorian cast iron lampposts in St Andrews on hearing the Council planned to take them away. And possibly give them to Clifton. Apparently the Council occasionally snaffles the street furniture of some areas to nice up conservation areas like Clifton.

Former German WW2 pilot Willi Schludecker, 87, travelled to Bath for a memorial service and to apologise for his part in the notorious 'Baedeker Raid' of 24-25 April 1942 in which 400 Bathonians were killed and hundreds more injured.

"The use is compatible with a farm because it is a farm building ... It is located where it is because it is in the most convenient place - being on the farm and near the farmhouse. The building is a single storey with the central section raised to allow for higher equipment. It cannot be lower because nothing could be stored in it. It is not made any higher because that would be silly." Wells architect John Jessop, said the sarcastic tone of his planning application to Mendip District Council for a storage barn on farm was prompted by the bureaucratic demands of the planning process. In the part headed 'access' he wrote: "There is an airport at Bristol which can be accessed by driving your tractor along the road ... This gives direct access to warm sunny places all over the world. There is a bus service to North Wooton which allows people from the local towns to come and visit the proposed shed. However, you have to change buses at Wells or somewhere else if you want to go somewhere else. There is nowhere to park tractors in Wells."

VILLAINS

The directors of evil global chocolate firm Cadburys were tracked down by an Evening Post reporter having a slap-up meal at a posh London restaurant days after announcing the Keynsham plant was to definitely close and 500 jobs be exported to Poland.

Peter Ogden, 74, complained to the Evening Post that being made a prisoner in his own home was the worst experience of his life. Mr Ogden had been sentenced to a curfew order and had to wear an electroinic tag after failing to stop at the scene of an accident. Mr Ogden says his ordeal had left him with no faith in the police and criminal justice system. "This has been the worst three months of my life, and that includes time spent serving in the Army in Egypt." Kirsty Hatcher, 25, whom he had left with life-threatening injuries some months previously, is reported to be slowly getting her life back together.

Tony Tootle from Totterdown is a habitual thief who, say the cops, has struck at least 100 times in the past 18 months, who's particularly attracted to women's handbags hanging over the backs of chairs. He had an anti-social behaviour injunction slapped on him, banning him from the centre of Bristol.

A journalist from a Bristol news agency which supplies schlock horror stories to the red tops was cautioned by police after supplying booze to 16-year-olds as part of some story he was making up, sorry, investigating, about out-of-control-teen-hoodies-yob-scum. Later the same evening, some of the kids who were given the drink were involved in a fracas in Stoke Gifford and one was left in a coma for weeks afterwards.

"I don't want her to turn up with a guy with a turban on, it's going to freak her out. She's not used to Asians."
- Bubbly (and now very ex-) BBC Radio Bristol presentress Sammy Mason ordering a taxi for her daughter.

THE GROVES OF ACADEME

Boffins at Bristol Uni devised an equation which will enable you to make the perfect cheese sandwich. Don't worry if you can't do equations; you can use an automated version which is on the interweb at www.cheddarometer.com

Bath University launched Britain's first ever degree course for undertakers, covering everything from the day-to-day running of a funeral parlour all the way to how to do a burial at sea.

Bristol Uni researcher Marcus Munafo plied a group of volunteers with enough booze to make them "tipsy" - getting them absolutely rat-arsed was deemed to be unethical - and then showing them loads of photos of people's faces, some pretty, some handsome, some mingers. Compared to a sober control group, the ethically inebriated students rated the faces as far more attractive than the sober lot did. Beer goggles are for real then! Who'd have thought? 

University of Gloucestershire authorities launched an inquiry after a video came to light of an initiation ceremony involving students lined up against a wall with Tesco carrier bags over their heads, being encouraged to drink themselves stupid by a man in a Nazi uniform. Later, a female student told the BBC that they have all sorts of elaborate rituals and that she was forced to put fish in her bra and then eat it.

Bristol Uni undergraduate Alex Fiallos got squiffy and drove the new Mini his Mummy and Daddy bought him around the grounds of Wills Hall. It was driving up a flight of steps at 30mph that did for the motor, causing the radiator to blow up, the two front tyres to burst and both airbags to deploy. Silly Alex!

WTF?!?

A 19-year-old from Glastonbury formerly known as George Garratt changed his name by deed poll (£10 online) to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine The Hulk And The Flash Combined. He told the papers his grandmother was no longer talking to him.

Ayeshah Smith, 20, of Brislington got the name and logo of the Illusions Magic Bar in Clifton tattooed on her back to remind her of all the good times she'd had there before moving to Edinburgh. The Evening Post website asked, more in hope than anticipation: "Do you have any Bristol landmarks tattooed on your back? Email us with yours."

In the August edition of the Portishead parish magazine, the Reverend Clive Laws, who was leaving his job as assistant parish priest to move to god-fearing Chelmsford wrote: "I believe there is an immense battle going on here in Portishead, indeed all through the Gordano Valley. I believe that there are spiritual forces of wickedness that are fighting against the coming of Christ's kingdom in this place. They are intent on breaking and destroying all that is good and true". The Diocese of Bath and Wells later insisted there is no more or less evil in Portishead than anywhere else.

Wiltshire police arrested a 32-year-old man in Westbury in February on suspicion of outraging public decency. He was allegedly having sex with a lamp-post.

Rail passengers travelling the Bristol-Paddington line called police to report seeing a man standing in a field near Yate wearing nothing but a suspender belt.