2004-12-31 - 10:31 a.m.

One of our office is still missing. He�d gone off on holiday last week and we were all jealous that he would be sunning himself in Krabi over Christmas. I printed some stuff for him, a feature I�d written on the destination last year and some online travel guide pages, though not, sadly, tips on what to do if a wave the size of New Zealand takes a running jump at your hotel.

He might be OK, of course. I have to admit that if I was walking away from rampant wave death, my first thought would not be, �Boy, I should really call all those people in the office I kind of half know and tell them not to let Sally from accounts steal my desk by the window or my good stapler.� Call me a pernickety old fashioned nancy boy, but I think I might have other things on my mind, to be fair.

You can almost hear the sigh of relief from the media that the death toll has reached over 100,000. Six figure casualty lists mean that the TV news graphics departments can do nice dramatic league tables, and have these random numbers leaping out from the screen at you. Dead, missing, homeless, aid, money pledged, like they�re balancing the books and some big computerised sum is going to make it all alright.

The granddaughter of a famous film director was killed, so at least the tabloids can focus on the celebrity angle. It typifies the hierarchy of tragedy that they automatically revert to: People who work in showbusiness, their young, white, female relatives, their other relatives, plebs from our country, plebs from Europe, plebs with brown skin and no huts to go back to. It�s the natural order. Someone who can operate a camera is way more important than a four generations of a fishing community, obviously.

My favourite numbers so far, though, are the �122 BILLION that the US have spent so far reducing Iraq to near molecular levels, against the �18 MILLION that they have pledged in aid.

Let�s look at those figures again, because to the ignorant an inattentive layman, they can be confusing.

US citizen�s money spent killing innocent people in an illegal war��122andi�malmostgettinghardjustsayingthenumberBILLION. Money pledged to save small children clinging to bits of wood in the lake that used to be their villages��18wedon�tcareifyouareallbuddhistsMILLION.

Well, tie a buoy to my winkie and use me as an early warning system, isn�t that generous? George, why not just have your boys stop launching missiles into family weddings for a day or two and use the money saved to actually do some good in this world? A crazy thought, I know, but it�s a New Year, after all.

You kind of wish the big film director in the sky would make his new feature �2005: A New Hope�, but you get the feeling the suffix is going to be �The Empire Strikes Back.�

Still, if you kind of squint, the new year looks like �ZOOS� and that makes you think of monkeys, which has to be a good thing.

Enjoy New Year�s Eve. Be good. And if you can�t be good, at least record the events on digital camera and post the pictures in your internet diary so that the rest of us can take the piss.