Dum-de-dum. Happy New Year. Does dum-de-dum count as one word or three? The word count button suggests it registers as just one word, so to get full value out of dum-de-dum you need to deploy it three times in the opening paragraph. Just to set the scene.LockerRoom

You know how it is around this time. Dum-de-dum. Nothing happening. Nothing to write about. Deadsville. People come up to you and say: "Heh, heh, what are you going to write about this week. The O'Byrne Cup?" and you say: "Yeah. Well, maybe I will."

Then there is that certain shadowy presence who sits behind the sports editor's desk and actually draws the sports editor's salary and who lets it be known if he lives to be 100 years old it then will be soon enough for him to read another LockerRoom column about "nothing". Or as the shadowy presence refers to it with the benefit of his professional newspaper training, "about bleedin' nothing".

What can you do? Let me tell you that LockerRoom approaches the fallow season with good intentions. The best intentions. He sometimes squirrels away little titbits which can be cut and pasted to make up columns over the New Year period. In November he inadvertently deletes these titbits from his laptop. In early January he begins to miss them. What better panacea than to free readers' minds of the harrowing images left by the Late, Late Show special tribute to Twink? Sorry.

Intentions, I tell you. Every year he grandly announces to Madame LockerRoom and Les Miserables there shall be an expedition, en famille, to the Leopardstown Races - the venue, incidentally, where the shadowy presence who sits in the sports editor's desk annually adds to the legend of his unfeasible jamminess by adding to his fortune a large portion of the hard-earned ducats of honest bookmakers.

An expedition to Leopardstown would serve two functions. It would rid Pere LockerRoom and Madame LockerRoom of any spare change left over after the purchase of lavish gifts for Les Miserables. And it would fill a New Year column.

Given the annual round of "loadsamoney" vulgarity which surrounds the shadowy presence's burgling of the Leopardstown bookmakers this column feels it is easily within his range to be the idiot savant of the tote and to outdo all in the vulgarity with which he would celebrate his placepot coup.

Sadly in the days after Christmas, LockerRoom finds his transom fastened securely, but unprotestingly to the badly upholstered armchair in the living-room. Only when it grows dark does he think to say to the childer, in tones of immense regret, he forgot to take them to the races. Again.

There is, of course, the option of the traditional New Year's column. Some hokum about resolutions which the following summer just leads to cruel comments being overheard as LockerRoom transports himself up the steps of some county ground towards the elevation of the press box.

"Jaysus your man is as big as ever. That didn't last long."

"Even money he has a heart attack before he gets to the top of the steps."

Rude, vile pigs as Elton, my friend in glamour, would say.

Alternatively, there is the "ones to watch" column. This is a form of bad voodoo practised by fools. Years ago, when I freelanced in the Sunday Tribune we used to practise a variant of it, called the Tribune Curse. It actually existed. The first two features I wrote for the Tribune were enough to convince me.

Week One: A puff piece heralding the accession to the pro ranks of John McHenry the golfer. Whodat? you ask. Exactly.

Week Two: A loving piece on Paul Curran under the headline "Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere, For the Dubs."

Unfortunately not that particular Sunday in Louth. Paul had his retina separated from his eye while debating Descartes (should they go before deshorses?) in a chip shop the night before the game. And so on.

The "Ones to Watch" column is merely a more refined, more spiteful version of The Tribune Curse. You take several young saplings just beginning to grow into sturdy prospects and you trample on them with your size 12 expectations. Then, for half a decade afterwards, you shake your head and say, "I really thought he'd make something of himself. I even wrote about it." As if you are the injured party. Which, of course, you are.

Then there is the dangerously amusing device of writing a piece in early January the conceit of which is that it pretends to be a piece written the next December looking back on the year that just was. Get it? It's a satirical preview masquerading as a solemn review. Fabulous. And not at all hackneyed!

For example, in January 2004 somebody who was accomplished with the technique, might, for a jape, have written a few pars that purported to look back on a delicious scandal involving , lets just say, a horse named after a world famous brand of Irish crystal plus the godson of a big newspaper tycoon plus the Olympic Games plus a stolen urine sample! The satire would lie in the very preposterousness of the notion.

It's easy, as you can see, to go too far with the whole thing and, besides, it's a clichéd and tired device which reeks on the one hand of pretentiousness and, on the other, of laziness and this column used it every year bar one from 1994 to 2001 and can't rightly go at it again till things settle down.

So that's that.

Spite is always good and useful in this season of goodwill. Working on the premise that "if you turn one cheek then you only have one left" Jimmy Breslin, the great New York columnist, used to publish an annual New Year column listing off the people to whom he wouldn't be speaking in the 12 months which lay ahead. Stuff like "Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. He gets permanent listing . . . every time you let a German near a typewriter, to do anything except repair it, he goes straight to authoritarianism."

"Society Carey . . . I know what he thinks about me, but it's not half as bad as what I think about him."

This is excellent column filler, but all very well for the laureate Breslin who lives in a borough of New York City and can, without effort, pass a year without actually bumping into anybody whose name appears on the list. Furthermore, Breslin has always seemed to me like the kind of fellow the withdrawal of whose conversation and company would actually be a penalty. This is a considerable asset.

This column lacks those advantages of habitat and charisma. People fear the cruel and unusual punishment of LockerRoom's gruelling small talk. Then there is the fact if it were raining soup LockerRoom would just have washed his hair. This column is a misfortunate poor hoor.

This column's wretched luck would be to meet the blacklisted people on the street as they came out of their newsagents with mobiles fastened to their ears while gleefully calling each other with congratulations.

"Hey! No more walking home the long way. He's not talking to me for 12 whole months! Zippedy doo-dah, zippedy day . . . "

People would clamour to get on the list - so there shall be no list. Well, just a short one. Hello (and goodbye) to the sweatered bedstain who has been faxing to all the various authorities of golf copies of those columns of ours which fail to genuflect humbly before the altar of the Ryder Cup.

The stated objective is to bring into being a ban on a LockerRoom accreditation to the Ryder Cup! Pringled Nazi! See ya in the K Club baby! Neither, of course, shall I be speaking to Angelina Jolie. She knows why.

Anyway. Dum-de-dum.

Did I wish you Happy New Year yet?