I’m kind of mentally strapped this week, so you’ll have to excuse me while I plunder my phone and compile some of the pictures that I’ve snapped over this past year.

My son (aged 4) has progressed in his writing skills and is becoming quite an artist, mā shā’ Allāh. This is one of many works he has exhibited.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that this is a photograph of his bedroom wall and the actual size of his “re-creation of a heartbeat monitor” is around 2 metres in length.

When he started school I expected to see him learn to restrict his artistic flare to paper/card/sand-pits, etc. and leave decorating the walls to me (when I can be bothered that is). But I caught him again recently, “You’ve been drawing on the walls again, haven’t you?” He denied it but flashed this “How did you know it was me?” look of shock. Well son, I’d like to be able tell you that it was something sophisticated like matching your fingerprints or finding your DNA at the scene but what first made me suspicious was when I noticed you’d wrote your name.

Other graffiti that caught my eye this year, and to which I present the “most succinct political refutation” award, was by the person who added the words “New Labour” (Tony Blair’s political party) to a poster advertising the Madame Tussaud’s Waxwork Museum.

The “Think before you park” award this year goes to Mr. Underneath-a-Nest-in-a-Tree.

The most inexplicable scene has been finding three shoes (all from different pairs) sitting at a bus stop at 5 a.m. If anyone can come up with a plausible explanation for this shoe-ery I’d be interested in hearing it.

The least convincing guarantee I saw this year came from an estate agent.

But this year’s Design Award has to go to the person who installed the two handled door at my place of work.

I assume it was designed by a man who has never had to open a door whilst holding a cup of tea before. I made repeated requests to management that someone authorise the removal of one of the handles but was told that this would affect the fire-proof status of the door. So this invention is pro-fire-fighting is it? You can just picture the scene, a fireman putting the damsel that he is saving from a blazing fire down, so that he can use both hands to open the door and exit. So in the spirit of compromise I offered an alternative solution and suggested that management should supply all staff with an extra arm.

After the events of 7th July in London I spotted this graffiti scrawled on the wall of a hospital elevator. The ‘K’ of ‘Kill’ on the far left is slightly obscured because the elevator doors opened when I was taking this shot and I moved the camera feeling conscious that there may be a crowd of people behind me wondering why some guy was photographing the lift wall.

But that was not very nice now, was it? Messrs Bush and Blair have been working very hard in recent years bombing thousands upon thousands of Muslims and this is the type of comment they get?