Wee Ginger Dug

And the winner in 2nd is… Buffalo Gal

by Paul Kavanagh

Well it’s almost over now. 2016 has been the year that sucked more than a Dyson on steroids, was more mince than the meat counter at Morrisons, and made less sense than Wullie Rennie’s claim at the Scottish Lib Dem conference in November that it was his party which had actually won the year’s Holyrood elections even though his party ended up with fewer seats than there are in yer maw’s front room. There’s only a couple of weeks to go now before we get to 2017 so at least we’ve survived the year. Whether we survive 2017 with the Donald as prez is a moot point.

The year was marked with a series of unexpected celebrity deaths. One after another they passed away, almost as though they couldn’t bear to live in the worsening world that they were leaving behind. And the ones we were losing were not even the sort of celebrities who appear on Strictly or anything presented by Ant and Dec.

It was people who actually had talent and whom you were able to recognise. People that not only had you heard of, but your maw had heard of too. We lost David Bowie, Prince, Lemmy, Victoria Wood, Caroline Aherne, Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Terry Wogan, Muhammad Ali, Ronnie Corbett, and more, and not to be left out Paul Daniels and Pete Burns too. It’s a sign of just how cruel 2016 was that it saw the demise of so many great and much missed talents, yet Noel Edmonds, Phil Collins, Ant and Dec, and Bono are still going strong.