Zoyo

There has been a heated debate about what to call this year: "Twenty-ten" and "Two-thousand-and-ten" appear to be the front runners, with "Ten" and "Two-oh-ten" as outsiders.

I'd rather attack this one head on, and as somebody who once failed an eyesight test*, would like to suggest "Zoyo", because if you substitute letters for numbers, "2010" looks a bit like "ZOIO" (pronounced "Zoyo").

* When I was in hospital after an exploding bottle smashed in my left eye, I was faced with one of those charts, and being an accountant rather than a poet, dutifully recited "One, five, two, eight, four ...". The doctor gazed at me horrified and told me that the chart actually read "I, S, Z, B, A...".

As you do under these circumstances, I then learned the whole chart off by heart, right down to the letters that were only a couple of millimetres high, by dint of leaving my right eye slightly open. A couple of days later the doctor told me that my eyesight appeared to have recovered, at which stage it was my turn to gaze at him horrified and tell him in no uncertain terms that his stupid chart was a test of memory, not a test of eyesight.