How were your Christmas/New Year/Hari Raya Haji holidays? Lots of festive fun? Mine were pretty low-key, due to a dose of the flu on top of my workaholic or at least writaholic inability to relax.

So low-key, in fact, that one of the higher points of the season that I can recall occurred at Gourmet Square in Ipoh where the family had dinner on Christmas Eve.

There we all were, happily slurping down our noodles and such when suddenly there was a stir of excitement in the crowd, with lots of squealing and dozens of diners springing excitedly to their feet.

For a moment I thought there must be some kind of celebrity arriving on the scene, or at least an inadequately-dressed female making a sensational appearance. But no, the commotion turned out to be caused by one of the food-court rats scurrying around under the tables pursued by a food-court cat.

I found myself rooting for the rodent, I must confess, seeing its panic-stricken flight as a symbol of how I've long felt about the Christmas/New Year season.

Which is that, just as we're totally fagged-out by the effort of flogging ourselves through another year of the rat-race, the last thing we need is to force ourselves into a final, flat-out frenzy of shopping, wrapping, cleaning, decorating, cooking, eating, drinking, meeting and greeting that's almost enough to finish us off.

And besides this excess of effort that's expected of us just when our energies are at their lowest, there's the question of the emotional toll the whole thing takes. Some families reunite and do nothing but fight. And people who find themselves all alone, through either choice or circumstance, can be consumed by terrible feelings of abandonment and loss.

So it's hardly surprising that the festive season is a peak period for both domestic disturbances and suicides.

Pathetically ineffectual

Which brings me to the painful if obvious point, as pathetic a party-pooper as it undoubtedly makes me, that horror never takes a holiday. The most chilling evidence of this at the close of 2006 was, of course, the horrific pictorial portrayal in the media of the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

As violently opposed as I am to travesties of justice in general, as this now-defunct dictator's trial clearly was, as well as to capital punishment in particular, I suppose I should at least be relieved that the world is finally free of the Beast of Baghdad.

But of course it isn't. His homicidal spirit survives in the souls of those of his Shia and Sunni former subjects devoting themselves to mutual sectarian slaughter, apparently hating each other and even life itself more than they love the God they claim to worship in common.

And most of those who armed, supplied, supported or simply tolerated Saddam in his 20 years of mayhem, from the Americans who finally turned on the monster they'd helped create to the corrupt beneficiaries of the Iraq 'Oil for Food' program, are also still hanging around.

So, of course, is the so-called "Arab League", which has always been as pathetically ineffectual in dealing with Saddam Hussein and other Middle-Eastern problems as Asean has been in bringing freedom and justice to the people of Burma.

Or, in fact to some of its other members' own citizens. In 2006 the Thai military once again saw the necessity to rescue the country's populace from corruption and oppression; Singapore's perpetually-in-power PAP continued to silence dissenting voices in its customary draconian fashion; President Arroyo of the Philippines managed to keep dodging impeachment on allegations of vote-rigging and corruption; Indonesia persisted in its program of letting the Soeharto family off as lightly as possible; and Malaysia failed for the third year in a row to deliver on its PM's promise to seriously combat corruption.

Which brings us to the feast 2007 has in store for observers of Malaysia's forensic system, the forthcoming trial of the suspects in the murder of the Mongolian woman. Some optimists are hoping that things may have improved since the farcical Anwar Ibrahim corruption and sodomy cases a decade ago.

But I'm not so sure. The judge who presided over the miserable mistrials of Anwar, far from suffering any setback to his career, has in the intervening years been promoted to a much higher court. And already there are ominous signs that justice may prove just as elusive in the forthcoming murder and conspiracy cases.

Persistent rumours

Early reports of the crime by that most dubious of sources, the Malaysian press, painted the Mongolian victim as a model and portrayed the crime as one of passion.

But persistent rumours since have characterized the woman as not a model but an interpreter, and the motive for her murder as not sexual at all, but more to do with secret "commissions" on a Russian or other arms deal.

Other odd features of the case to have emerged already include the court's allowing bail to the defendant charged with conspiracy to murder; the same defendant's request to the court for a variation to his charge; and the prosecution's efforts to head-off any suspicions of wider or higher-level involvement in the crime with the statement that the three people charged thus far are definitely the only ones involved.

So you see that my festive season this year has been not so much all about giving, as our friends in the retail trade would so dearly have loved it to be, as misgivings that 2006 ended so badly.

Not just for the wretched Saddam Hussein and believers in genuine justice for all, but also for thousands of Malaysians who lost the possessions, and some their lives, in the floods; for the hundreds drowned in the Indonesian ferry capsize; and for all the usual victims of festive-season frivolity both on and off the roads.

Though there's not much point in festering about it all, I suppose. Better we wish each other, as always, a heartfelt "Happy New Year", and both resolve to do whatever we can in the next 12 months to help make it come true for us all.