SO how did your January turn out?

If you’re anything like us at Guide Towers, you’ll have broken the last of your new year’s resolutions and spectacularly fallen off the wagon – wisely ignoring all those rash promises to detox, spend less and generally behave.

Whatever you’ve been up, I hope you’ve been more careful than erstwhile Blur bassman Alex James.

Writing in his Notebook column in The Independent, the floppy-fringed farmer recounted a close shave on his West Oxfordshire farm.

“The pond was frozen,” he wrote. “I wondered if I would be able to run over to the island in the middle. I put one foot on the ice to test it. There was a big crack as I fell flat on my back. I lay there trying not to break the ice. I just about managed to wriggle back without going under. Dangerous, that stuff.”

Not as dangerous, though, as those mean-spirited judges on ITV’s latest ratings grabber – Popstar to Operastar.

After a valiant attempt to impress the experts by thrutching through an aria from the Barber of Seville, the po-faced panel, which included professional fop-doodle Laurence Llewlyn Bowen, dashed the cheesemeister’s attempt to headline at Covent Garden.

“That is as far from opera as singing can be; totally bad,” came the stinging attack from Tijuana tenor Rolando Villazon. Ouch!

On the subject of musos in the news, well done to East Oxford shoegaze legend Mark Gardener, who continues to send the ladies weak at the knees, 14 years after the break-up of his band Ride.

Speaking on Radio 2’s Radcliffe and Maconie show, lusciously-locked comedienne Lucy Porter confessed she still harboured a crush on our Mark. “I can’t think of him without going all ‘mmmmm!’,” she told the locquacious Lancastrians.