Going Away v Staying at Home: yeah, you might get a tan and, yeah, you might get an idea of what Christmas is like in other cultures — albeit mainly the Holiday Inn culture of Orlando, Florida. But a) luggage considerations will mean that everyone who goes with you will be both giving and receiving an iPod Shuffle. And b) your nan will be lonely. What are you doing?

Winner: Home. Going abroad for the one week when Britain is at its best (ie, semipermanently drunk)? Are you nuts?

Slade v Wizzard: in the thrilling Merry Christmas Everybody, Noddy Holder intended to write the great working-class Christmas song. With its euphoric debauchery undercut with melancholy, and its Royle Family-like lyrics (“Does your granny always tell ya that the old songs are the best?/ Then she’s up and rock’n’rolling with the rest”), Merry Christmas Everybody does, to its endless credit, accurately simulate wandering round your home-town Woolie’s, drunk and whimsical on Christmas Eve, wondering whether to buy your mum a pink Ladyshave for £9.99. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, meanwhile, is so great that one simply goes along with Roy Wood’s assertion that it would be great if every day were Christmas Day. Rather than pausing for a minute and saying “Actually, Roy, if it were Christmas every day, the UK’s productivity rates would ensure that we were a Third World country by March, and we’d all have scoliosis from sleeping on an inflatable mattress in the spare room. And, indeed, would have noticed that the person most set to benefit from it being ‘Christmas every day’ would be someone famous mainly for having written a very big song about it being Christmas every day (ie, you).”

Winner: Slade. However much of a genius Wood is, there’s only one song that has Holder shouting “IT’S CHRIIIIIIISMUSSSSS!” Though honourable mention must be made of John and Yoko’s hilarious Happy Christmas (War Is Over), and the bit at the end where Lennon clearly can’t be bothered to write another verse of slightly pious yuletide doggerel, and he and Yoko go “ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH” instead.

Clear v coloured fairy lights: working- class people have multicoloured lights, because they’re “magic”; middle-class people have clear lights, because they’re “classy”. People who were working class but have become middle class buy clear lights, then spend the Christmas season feeling vaguely uncomfortable that their tree looks a bit sparse and Puritan. Those who were born middle class are too busy lighting their White Company winter candles to notice.

Winner: coloured fairy lights. I mean, they are magic. Apart from the pointless green ones, which get a bit lost among the greenness of a green tree.

Quality Street v Roses: like George Foreman v Muhammad Ali — but with nougat — Quality Street v Roses was the hot topic of 1980s Christmases. Ostensibly similar — coffee crèmes, strawberry crèmes, various shenanigans with nuts and caramel — Roses were always streets ahead, because of the fact that, in Britain, toddlers are weaned on Buttons, meaning that choc = Cadbury’s. The only thing going for Quality Street was the Green Triangle which, in 1984, seemed like some high-tech, other-worldly vision of the future, possibly beamed down from the set of V. Thanks to the subsequent rise of Celebrations and Miniature Heroes — whose makers correctly surmised that the optimum size for the otherwise glue-like Mars bar is approximately 2cm — both Roses and Quality Street have had to face a radically changed chocolate landscape. For Roses, this has meant acting like Tony Blair, and scrapping many of the aspects — coffee crème, strawberry crème, toffee penny — that one presumed were inimical to the Labour Party. Er, I mean Roses. Quality Street, meanwhile, has acted like the Tories under Michael Howard, and tried to reiterate what it sees as its core values: primarily, cheap toffee. The end result has been Quality Street’s new Malt Toffee, wherein Nestlé has “invented” an undissolved lump of Horlicks wrapped in foil. Friends, that is an industrial hot-drinks-making by-product, not a sweet.

Winner: Roses. You can’t argue with the mighty Caramel Keg.

Who gives a hoot about owls on a pole?

Devon and Cornwall police have revealed some of the time-wasting calls they’ve received recently. Members of the public have dialled 999 to complain about phone batteries running out, pizzas not arriving, builders being too noisy, and to report a large owl sitting on a telegraph pole. One woman called the emergency services when she realised that her trousers didn’t fit. Chief Inspector Nick Jarrold said: “An emergency call (means) a life-or-death situation, people are injured or there are baddies still at the scene.”

All well and good. But who, then, are you supposed to call when your trousers don’t fit, or there’s a large owl sitting on a telegraph pole? Clearly, one should be able to call one’s parents but, alas, in the modern age they are quite likely to be off on a cannabis-smoking weekend in Amsterdam, or getting together a self-financed gonzo movie, all shot on mobile phones, in Seattle. We need a premium-rate phoneline, called “Old-Fashioned Grown-Ups Concerned With Your Existential Ephemera”, staffed by people who once worked at John Lewis and Good Housekeeping. They’d know what to do about the trousers — and the large owl.

Best for Britney

It’s nearly three weeks since popstrel sexpot Britney Spears announced shewas divorcing husband Kevin Federline — but she has not, as yet, married anyone else. I know it will take time for her wounds to heal, but if she hasn't shacked up with another untrustworthy, weasel-faced, W-list sponging no-hoper by Christmas Eve, can’t we freight her over Calum Best? Just to save time, if nothing else.

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