It doesn't give me any pleasure that Toga the penguin was stolen from his familial abode at a zoo on the Isle of Wight, honestly it doesn't. In fact, I probably felt a bit sad about the whole situation for a few min-utes over the Christmas period.

There. I've said it.

However - and feel free to write in calling for me to be tarred and feathered for this - is the theft of a pen-guin really, really, really worth all the column inches and broadcast time that have been devoted to it over the last week?

No, it's a not very nice thing to have happened.

Yes, it's a very "Christmassy" story. And, of course, I am aware that the festive period is a bit of a thin time for real news - trust me, I was that man who tried (and succeeded) to devote the whole of a front page to a story about a fire at a pie factory in Wigan.

But the fact is that poor little Toga was unlikely to survive beyond a few days out of his mother's loving wings, and if he didn't end up as someone's Christmas dinner (penguin is a little less dry than turkey, ac-cording to the eskimo cookbook) then he is probably en route to a landfill site somewhere (if in fact they have them on the Isle of Wight).

What I can't understand is the sheer outpouring of grief and anger over Toga's fate. No, I'm sorry, I don't see the fact that some nutter decided to p-ppick up a penguin and stash it in his rucksack as incontro-vertible proof of man's inhumanity to man. Or to penguin, rather.

Millions dying of disease and violence in far-off countries. Hundreds of thousands on the breadline here at home. Norman Kember on death row at the hands of Islamic fanatics. Sudanese refugees beaten to death by Egyptian police. Sixyear-old girls snatched from their baths and assaulted. These are the signs that we as a species are no closer to living in harmonious peace than we were when every home had a donkey's jawbone by the door for the hitting of stray woolly mammoths with. Kidnapped penguins, I'm afraid, just don't compete.

Which hasn't, of course, stopped the world latching on to the story. Apparently there was a candlelit vigil in New York, of all places, for Toga.

You'd have perhaps thought that New Yorkers, of all people, might have in recent years experienced enough to be able to put this sort of thing in perspective.

Closer to home, "stars" have been coming out to declare their outrage at Toga's kidnapping. Black Sab-bath bassist Geezer Butler has personally put up a £5,000 reward for Toga's return, presumably so his old band-mate Ozzy Osbourne can bite the head off the thing.

And the likes of Big Brother reject Kamal, Aussie soap star Ray Meagher and - rather predictably - ven-triloquist Keith Harris and his green duck with a face like a spanked backside Orville have all made emo-tional pleas for Toga's kidnapper to be caught. The fact that they are all in panto at the moment and they've managed to get themselves - and their shows - mentioned in national newspapers presumably has no bearing whatsoever on the matter.

The reward money for Toga's return is currently sitting at a rather nifty £31,000. Funnily enough, I just searched on the internet to find out what the reward money was like for information leading to the safe return of hostages Norman Kember in Iraq and the Burton family in the Gaza Strip, and funnily enough I can't find any mention of money at all.

All of which means we closed 2005 pretty much as we entered it, with a shrug of the shoulders and a mut-tering of: "Funny old world. . ."