We’d just like to double-check that everyone got the memo regarding it being the season to be jolly tra la la la la la la la la – because Robbie Williams seems to have got the memo saying it’s the season to be really really unusually miserable.

Whether you spend this week making your home look beautiful and seasonal, or basically teaching your children that if they sit on the laps of a succession of creepy old men without crying or struggling they’ll be given sparkly presents instead of years of therapy and marriage-destroying intimacy issues, spare a thought for Robbie Williams – because he’s deeply miserable. In an interview with The Big Issue, Robbie Williams says that he’s never going to have children, because any child of his will have to endure a lifetime of pain, Pain, PAIN!

If we were married to Ringo Starr – and who’s to say that one day we won’t be – we’d be cacking it. Just days after Yoko Ono allegedly got a death threat from her driver, Heather Mills has been given a panic alarm by police after getting threats too.

Admittedly the threats that Heather Mills aren’t quite as frightening as Yoko’s – nobody has been boasting about injecting poison into her body while she sleeps, for instance – but the police are treating Heather Mills’ threats as non-specific and not especially imminent. But – hey – who knew that monoped former naked models that divorce Beatles in bitter and high-profile ways were so disliked. As well as helping to install security equipment in the home of Heather Mills after the threats, police have also spoke to Paul McCartney about the matter, who is thought to have replied “It weren’t me copper, you can’t prove anything copper” before throwing a smoke bomb to the ground and mysteriously vanishing into the ether.

When you look back on on 2006, you’ll probably think something like “Cuh, it was rubbish when our gutter split” or “I wish I hadn’t developed that ingrown toenail” but, regardless of who you are, you won’t have had a weirder 2006 than Mel Gibson.

So far this year, Mel Gibson has hit the headlines for making a film so relentlessly filled with monumental violence that cinema staff have to wear crash helmets in case the more easily influenced members of the audience instinctively try to batter their skulls in with a rock on the way out and – more importantly – said something unforgivably stupid to a policeman while being arrested for drink-driving. While that’d be enough to tide most people over for a year, Mel Gibson wants more – and that’s why an Australian woman has come forward claiming that she is the secret lovechild of Mel Gibson. And her own mother, presumably.