THE YEAR OF the hangover is coming to an end. Everyone I talk to is happy to kiss it goodbye.

For New Yorkers, 2002 was one long morning after. We all just want to log off and slink away with a huge pile of DVDs and a mug of hot chocolate. After 9/11 we expected a paradigm shift, the discovery of what we really wanted for our children, our country, ourselves.

But it didn’t come. (Beaten to death on TV talk shows?) This, I suspect, is what was behind the curious outburst of strike-nostalgia last week, an emotion inconceivable to Londoners who lived through the Winter of Discontent. New Yorkers felt almost warm and cosy about the impending chaos in Manhattan if, as they threatened right up to the midnight deadline, the transport workers had walked out. There were rousing tabloid stories about the 11 days in 1980 during the last strike when Mayor Koch led the city in fighting back and getting to work by foot, carpool and motorbike. In build-up press photos, Mayor Bloomberg seemed to have his leg permanently cocked over a bicycle.

It was also, I suspect, the attempt to rekindle how we felt in the first months after the terrorist attacks. New Yorkers secretly miss the people they became at that time, elevated by a new connectedness and the exhilarating absence of materialistic trivia. Beneath the city’s pace for a while there was a new undertow of meaning.

The strike didn’t happen in the end: another big Orange Alert let-down, thank God. We went back to the reassurance of more familiar pain — fighting over the last Juicy Couture sweatsuit at Saks Fifth Avenue (this year’s hot gift since it was first sighted encasing J-Lo’s magic behind).

THE MEDIA IS roused from the white noise of war punditry only by the sporadic fun of driving someone out of public life.

Henry the K was chased off the terrorism commission, to the regret of his enemies. It cut short a riveting soap opera of mixed motives. Would he have used his political cunning to penetrate DC’s formidable bureaucratic casuistry? Or would he have held back to rack up brownie points with the Bushies and his own unnamed consulting clients? I believe the former, but now we will never know.

Then there was the fallout from the truly delicious comedy of the Republican Senate Leader Trent Lott’s unfortunate remarks on the 100th birthday of Strom Thurmond, the mummified ex-segregationist senator from South Carolina. In the pandemonium that belatedly followed Lott’s nostalgia for the good ol’ days of Dixie when blacks knew their place, and then his inept serial apologies, the news clips kept returning like a Monty Python sketch to the shot of Thurmond propped in his wheelchair at the infamous party with a dazed smile on his face. Perhaps he is still there, slumped under a paper hat with his dentures rattling after the press pack stampeded through.

What must really have rankled the Lott/Thurmond camp was how the embarrassed Republicans piled on the censure as much as outraged Democrats. The right-wing pundit Dick Morris on Fox News called Thurmond an “abomination” whose “current senility is a vast improvement”. Happy Birthday, Strom!

The now inevitable fall of Lott was a triumph for the “bloggers” — the opinion samurai of the internet who lead the charge on any loose-lipped remark in public life. They kept stoking the story for days until it crossed over to the mainstream and burst into flames. The New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik has been proved right in his often-voiced prediction that the internet would be less an amazing instrument of information than the ideal medium for opinion, endlessly revised and delivered in short bursts.

Information takes time and money to acquire, but opinion on the web is fast and cheap. The industry has now become so prolific that it can exhaust a subject even before it’s happened. In the case of Lott all those roving bands of opinion could finally fasten on a fact.

Amazingly, it was none other than Al Gore who delivered the coup de grâce to Lott with a hilariously dead-on, professional-level impersonation on the satirical TV show Saturday Night Live. Resplendent in senatorial wig and tie, Gore-as-Lott explained that Thurmond had stood for many things beside segregation — for example, he also stood for keeping white people and black people separate.

Why is Al so great at swansongs? His concession speech in 2000 was better than anything that had gone before. The SNL sketch was such a hit it made him “in” for the first time after years of media ridicule. The press almost sounded sorry to see him take a bow.

I SOMETIMES GET calls from male friends wanting a suggestion of what to buy their superwoman wives for Christmas. I have a one-word answer for them.

Shoes. The higher-heeled the better. For metropolitan women of substance, shoes are the last bastion of babedom to fall. Witness how many amazons of business cling to strippers’ footwear under their tailored trousers. The toughest female prosecutor I know — she exults in dispatching paedophiles to the slammer — is the same woman who sends her stilettos back to Manolo Blahnik to add another two inches to the height.

The lethal shoe is an essential part of the business woman’s armoury. In the morning, you see the Alpha Moms dropping their kids at school all suited up for work. Breastplate: Armani jacket. Shield: Marc Jacobs bag. Lance: Christian Louboutin stilettos. Women over 40 are particularly addicted, perhaps because, whatever the humiliations of the changing room, shoes are the one glamour perk we can always get to fit.

At the end of the year from hell they are a great way to kick back.

tina.brown@thetimes.co.uk