This morning (Wednesday) you are waking up to headlines grabbed by the most 'interesting' and sympathetic recipients of Britain's New Year's honours.
'Interesting' in the sense that they will catch the public's attention as they are designed to: a sports personality here, a Pop Idol there.
In recent years the British government has had to try and manage the media reception of honours lists because the whole process stinks to high heaven.
So the people running the 'honours system', as it is called, feel they need to distract attention from unsavoury characters in the list by highlighting popular figures.
They know sticky brown stuff will hit the fan at the sight of another platoon of Tony's Cronies swaggering into the Lords alongside a group of Tory party funders nominated by Iain Duncan Smith when he was booted out as Conservative leader.
There's added piquancy in the north. Unionists of course love the whole business and some may still believe the process retains some integrity. They may even think the Queen has a hand in it, God help their wit. After all, if they're daft enough to support an inherently absurd political concept like a hereditary monarchy, why wouldn't they slaver over a bit of watered silk? Police and soldiers need bits of coloured ribbon on their tunics too. Fine. So they're welcome to their OBEs, CBEs, and what have you.
The real conundrum is people who have traded all their lives on nationalist credentials yet risk contempt and derision first of all for accepting anything to do with the British empire, defunct though it is, and secondly, for accepting anything at all from a British monarch.
Imagine having to go to Buckingham Palace and bow and get a wee box. Cringe. Why they do it remains a mystery. Perhaps they feel the need to be recognised publicly.
Perhaps they want to feel they've arrived. Where? Do they think it makes them accepted? By whom?
Still, you never hear them crow about their gong. In years past many of them claimed publicity could put their lives in danger so it was kept out of the local press. Pathetic. They must have been ashamed of it for anyone who wanted could buy the Times, trawl through the full list and have a good laugh at suckers who took the soup but didn't want anyone to see the dribbles on their bib.
The honours are strictly hierarchical as well. Isn't the whole point of the system to perpetuate inequality in society? There's a further indignity to honours here though. After MBEs for the little people at the bottom and OBEs for well-known little people, a couple of knighthoods are always doled out here but they're carefully ranked too. There are knighthoods and knighthoods y'know.
The top ones are not vouchsafed to colonials but reserved for top people in England.
Top knighthoods are the KCMG, known in the system as 'Kindly Call Me God' and, phew, the GCMG, 'God Calls Me God'. You'll not see any of them this side of the Irish Sea tomorrow.
The extraordinary thing is that people who regarded themselves as nationalists can be bought off with dross. What do they think being a Member of the British Empire means? What is more meaningless than a Commander of the British Empire?
Why could they not muster the dignity of the poet Benjamin Zephaniah who refused an OBE in November when Tony Blair's committee was offering them?
Zephaniah had already written a poem about the system. Those who made the offer had obviously not read it. It's called, appropriately, Bought and Sold:
The ancestors would turn in graves
Those poor black folk that once were slaves
Would wonder
How our souls were sold
And check our strategies,
The empire strikes back and waves
Tamed warriors bow on parades
When they have done what they've been told
They get their OBEs.
Here's the rub. It turns out that over the years about 300 authors, intellectuals, actors, artists, journalists have turned down honours: peerages, knighthoods and minor baubles. They include Isaiah Berlin, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Honor Blackman and the BBC's John Cole, offered a CBE in 1993.
He said: "I'm a republican. When I was in the Boys' Brigade I was very happy when someone gave me a wayfarer's badge, but I'm a grown-up chap now."
Now, since it's civil servants who draw up the list here and pass it for ratification to our proconsul for the time being who doesn't know the record of service of anybody here from a hole in the ground, what list would you want to be on, those who bent the knee, those who refused, or those they knew better than to insult by entering them on the list in the first place?
