We all know that Christmas traditions vary greatly around the world… DON’T WE?? That’s why other people’s’ customs can seem strange to our own eyeballs!

To take but one example: every Christmas Eve in Canada (formerly East Sausage Land), children smash all their unwrapped presents with a festive Christmas Brick.

Then they feed the fragments to Cauliflower Man, the Canadian version of Father Christmas. “Yum-yum plastic shards and Thierry’s choco-orange”, maybe he say.

No one knows how this custom started, but some say that Cauliflower Man himself may have started it – yes, ma’am, he himself – because he wanted to teach children (smaller people) about the broken dreams that lie ahead.

If you ask most people who is man’s best fridge, they will reply “the dog”. They might may might give you a fuller answer, like this:

“Like most people, I’d say man’s best fridge is the dog.”

However, that’s not what investigators at Surrey University are saying, neither. A recent study suggests that dogs are not fridges at all.

The confusion may have come about because, like dogs, fridges ‘eat’ meat. And like dogs, fridges go rusty and beg for scraps.

But according to the Surrey boffins, dogs are actually a species of seafaring, anus-investigating wasp.

So what is man’s best fridge??

“That’s easy,” scoffed lead scientist Dr Andrew Park. “Man’s best fridge is the cat.”

What what what would you say is the most marvellous organ in the human body? According to a 2012 National Coal Board poll, there’s no competition!

Over 98% of respondents in this poll voted for the Gib-O-Matic.

Located between your Tringle Mini-Ears, this marvellous organ is what makes you flop about like a fish whenever it rains.

Without the Gib-O-Matic, we would get really wet even in mizzle. It would make them fish sad.

That’s all for this time, but we’ll be back with more amazing Minty facts soon! Teddy’s Leg.

The Best Nuisance I Can Be isn’t full of outright nonsense like the above, but does contain a fair amount of daftness. It’s a novelisation of my real 1984-85 college diaries, covering my final undergraduate year. That tumultuous time was jam-packed full of friendship, love, fun… as well as horrible self-discovery.

If you ‘get’ the page you’ve just read, then you’ll instinctively understand why hiding my neighbour’s glasses inside a frozen chicken, introducing myself as ‘NKAARK!!’, and sending drawings of a shark eating Christmas cake to Lloyd’s Bank were – and remain – necessary activities.