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After a hiatus last year, when I forgot to do it, here’s the 2007 instalment of this blog’s ongoing project to fight the crude pigeon-holing tendencies shown by other end-of-year lists. No longer shall Neon Bible be relegated to the “best albums” parade, just because it was, in fact, an album. If Gordon Ramsay’s refurbished gastropub in Limehouse wants to compete for Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, rather than best restaurant, then it is free to do so. We not not bracket, compartmentalise, or divide. We celebrate unity through diversity.

So, here you go – here are the 19 best things of 2007:

19. The Arcade Fire at Glastonbury
Was it such a borderline epiphanic experience in spite of the drug-addled hippy with a poor sense of personal space who kept on trying to walk through my back during the entire set – or was it, in part at least, because of him? No. It was nothing to do with him. But thankyou anyway, kind sir.

18. Tony Blair fucked off
And for a precious, golden few days, it seemed like good sense, quiet competence and a dignified sense of principle might be restored to our government. Of course, not so much. But it was nice while it lasted. A clear winner of Vegetarian Restaurant of the Year.

17. The finger-tapping, eye-staring thing that The Rock does in Southland Tales to indicate that he’s going mad which is a bit like someone doing a Stan Laurel impersonation except they’ve never actually seen footage of Stan Laurel and have in fact just read about him on Wikipedia
Majestic.

16. Southland Tales
Astounding.

15. Impending sense of doom
It was a great year for the looming feeling that everything was about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Also on the up in 2007: despairing impotence in the face of the inevitability of decay.

14. Spooks
Just keeps getting better and better. Although, to be fair, it tailed off a little at the end, the season-long story arc thing mostly worked beautifully. Also, they got rid of Ros, the sour-faced harridan. Hurrah! R&B Single of 2007.

13. In A Nutshell by Pelle Carlberg
Narrowly beating out Jens Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala as the best indie-pop album released in 2007 by a Swedish male solo artist featuring excellent, wryly humorous lyrics and an intuitive grasp of blissfully catchy melodies – and this despite the fact that Lekman’s name is amusingly close to that of out-of-favour Arsenal shot-stopper Jens Lehman. This mainly because In A Nutshell has awesome tracks like ‘I Love You, You Imbecile’, ‘Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like Clever Girls’, and a ballad about stalking Mike Joyce from The Smiths called ‘I Touched You At The Soundcheck’.

12. Feel The Beat And Do It Anyway by Sparky’s Magic Piano
Excellent collection of twee electro-pop songs that capture a sweet-spot somewhere on the path from St. Etienne to Belle & Sebastian. More importantly, they’re my mates, and it’s always nice when you can honestly tell your friends that you really enjoyed something they’ve done, rather than just frantically nodding in a polite manner.

11. The fact that there weren’t actually any major elections taking place in America in 2007
Christ, it’s going to be a long ten months.

10. The ending of Life On Mars
Well, and all the rest of series two of Life On Mars, frankly. But the finale, with its heartwarming “everybody commit suicide to escape to a nostalgic fantasy world because modern life is unbearable” message, was fantastic stuff.

9. The films I haven’t seen yet
It was a rubbish year for movies, with virtually all the big summer films sucking harder than the Dyson R&D department, but then it got really good at then end. Except it didn’t if a) most of those movies won’t come out in the UK for another month, and b) I didn’t even manage to see the ones that have come out. Of the top twenty best reviewed films of 2007 on Metacritic, I’ve seen precisely one. Which was The Bourne Ultimatum.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum
Which was pretty damn good, I’ll admit. Although I more eagerly await the director’s cut, in which Paddy Considine’s mild-mannered Guardian journalist doesn’t get shot, but instead snaps when confronted with the injustice and cruelty of the world and goes on a Dead Man’s Shoes-style rampage of bloody vengeance. Best Fusion Cuisine Newcomer of the Year.

7. Charlie Brooker’s Ten Biggest Cocks and She-Cocks in Advertising

6. Shit terrorists
2007 gave us admirable new levels of terroristic incompetence, as a bunch of muppets tried to drive burning cars into annoying buildings, in the misguided belief that a) this would have some sort of destructive power, and b) anybody would give a shit if Tiger Tiger and Glasgow Airport burned to the ground. Skipping over the pleasing fact that our brave jihadis have clearly been watching too many films where modes of transport blow up for no apparent reason every time they have a slight prang (the helicopter in Cliffhanger being a personal favourite of mine), the rubbish attacks brought much joy. For one thing, they gave us a new breed of hero – the pissed-off Glaswegian baggage handler on his fag break. And for another, I got to do another one of my updated Terror Alert Scales:

5. Endless torrential rain sheeting down from apocalyptically dark skies
I wouldn’t normally say this was one of the best things about 2007, but seeing as it was the only fucking thing there was all year, the rules state that I have to let it in.

4. Hats
Hats were still good in 2007, as they previously were in 2006 and 2005 (and before) as well. Despite the regrettable rise in ubiquity of the twat in a hat – as every style-magazine reading cock and trend-worshipping fleshstain draped a pork-pie or trilby at a rakish angle off their empty, simpering heads – hats remained excellent in the past year. Fedoras offered refuge from the tidal ebb of transient vogue (and from the rain).

3. Blink
Not the book where Malcolm Gladwell talks about, oh, I dunno, stuff, but the episode of Doctor Who about the terrifying statues that only move when you’re not looking, which was considered by pretty much everybody who watched it to be the single best thing that’s ever happened on British television, and that includes the bit on Blue Peter where the elephant made a woopsie on the studio floor. Penned by shining god-like being Stephen Moffat, who looks odds-on to make it three Hugos in a row. Screw you, Battlestar Galactica.

2. Mesalamine
An excellent drug, which makes sick people feel better. Specifically, me. A clear winner of Travel Agent of the Year.

1. ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A.
The highlight of M.I.A’s corking album Kala, in which a former art-college student from London with a Tamil Tiger-linked father and a squeaky voice took the burden of the world’s oppressed upon her shoulders and encouraged them to rise up in self-empowerment and, you know, crime. Here, she steals equally from The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’ and Wreckx-N-Effect’s ‘Rump Shaker’ to produce the most unutterably summery, shimmering piece of pop to ever have gunshot sound effects in the place of a chorus. “All I wanna do is-” BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! “-and-” CLINK! KER-CHING! “-take your money.” The feel morally conflicted hit of the summer.

The 2005 list can be found here. Please feel free to point out any things that I missed off the list, or missed out on in 2007, in the comments.