Imagine it's Christmas 2059. The climate change refugee children that the government made you adopt after Weston-super-Mare fell into the sea clamber onto your lap and ask you to tell them stories of 50 years ago.

All the skunk and pills you did back in the day has fogged your memory. So the brain-chip the privatised NHS implanted when your cognitive and recall functions catastrophically failed their MoT a few years back kicks in. Two things about 2009 come flooding back.

First, the Banksy exhibition at the City Museum. Earlier in 2009, the Crimes of Passion show at the normally rather conservative RWA made Bristol's street art mainstream, but Banksy's show made it truly popular, and truly global. Tourism, business and civic bosses couldn't figure out the size of the favour it did for Brand Bristol, but it was huge.

The other thing you'll remember is the snow of late Jan/early Feb.

A visiting foreigner might have thought it was a local annual ritual to go and make snowmen on the Downs. But it's soooo not. Snow doesn't happen that often in Bristol, and when it did in the past, families with young children and gangs of fun-loving twentysomethings certainly didn't take to the Downs in large numbers to make snow sculptures.

The reason it happened this time is that sufficient critical mass of snow for sculpting is something people under the age of 30 have hardly ever seen in Bristol before.

(And <Old Fart mode> the few inches we had in 2009 were pathetic compared to some past years, such as '82, '77, '63, '47 etc)

Thanks to climate change and the milder, wetter winters we're expecting, you might not see snowmen on the Downs for many years to come.

It's easy to see how some might think that everything in Bristol's public life in 2009 was about the environment, that all politics was eco. Even Labour's traditional control of the city Council ended because of environmentalism.

In February they had a big meeting to set the annual budget (£365.2m since you ask). Labour had been running the Council as a minority administration for some time because even though the LibDems had more councillors, they didn't have an outright majority. Labour had proposed building an incinerator to burn household waste, the LibDems and Tories opposed it, so Labour resigned and invited the LibDems to form an administration. Which they did. Since then, the LibDems increased their hold in the local elections.

With the LibDems, the environment appears to be top of the agenda in most departments. Cllr Jon Rogers, the executive member for traffic jams, earns the most gold stars so far for standing up to his bureaucrats and insisting that Bristol's new 20mph zones include many more streets than originally planned.

Though Bristol failed to become a European Green Capital, it's acting as though it was one anyway, and, fair's fair, the city is indeed one of the greenest in Britain, by most measures.

Debates and arguments about traffic, housing and, of course, the proposed BCFC stadium and the associated supermarket development at Ashton Gate were all couched in environmental terms. Though nobody's quite sure how the Cycling City's £22m is being spent. The city is still full of little cycle lanes that go nowhere and the Hourbike bikes-for-hire scheme isn't working.

Arguments about the carbon footprint of every single thing we do will be happening for decades to come, but the thing about the environment is that it's easy. It's particularly easy for Bristol LibDems. They get the environment in a way that Labour and Tory councillors don't. And councillors enjoy posing for photo opportunities with schoolkids and bicycles, or signing up to the 10:10 pledge.

Yet as the middle classes busy themselves sorting the trash for recycling, plenty of other Bristolians wish they could afford the groceries to produce much trash from. Unemployment rose to 11,508 by September; it doubled in 12 months. That's 4.1% of the city's estimated total workforce, and for every unemployed person, there are two or three more who are working shorter hours or are acutely worried about their jobs.

The great building boom which peppered the skyline with cranes even a year ago is now over. Perhaps the most spectacular casualty has been Urban Splash, former poster boys of city regeneration, who took interesting old buildings and revitalised them. They were going to do something spectacular with Weston's Birnbeck Pier, and with Bristol's old 'Bridewell Island'. The former Imperial Tobacco building in Hartcliffe was to be a £50m housing development. Work on this hasn't finished and the company's hoping for government money to complete the job. If there's an upside to it, it looks like the amazing things that ArtspaceLifespace are doing at Bridewell will be going on for a while yet.

Recession impinged on several environmentally contentious issues. Bristol Airport's expansion plans were thrown into sharp relief by a significant fall in passenger numbers, while Lufthansa ended its Bristol-Frankfurt service, making a mockery of the Airport's claims that its expansion is essential for business. If there's not enough demand for flights from Bristol to one of the world's leading business centres then let's face facts; your bigger airport is to ferry the working classes to their annual fortnight in Spain or Croatia, and the middle classes rather more frequently to their French cottages, Irish golfing trips and those darling little European weekend city breaks.

In September, Australian-owned Macquarie Airports sold part of its stake in Bristol Airport for £128m to the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. Your local airport is now half-owned by Australians, and half by Canadian schoolteachers. And there was you thinking the Facebook group calling for it to be renamed Adge Cutler International was a silly idea!

Recession and politics partially defused the environmental timebomb that is the South West Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS). Technically, the reason its publication has been delayed is that an RSS elsewhere in the country is caught up in a legal challenge, but ... Well, in the run-up to a general election, it probably suits a lot of folks to not talk about a document which details 600,000 new homes in the region, with over 100,000 in the former Avon area, eating massively into the green belt.

Many developers tried to jump the gun, proposing buildings on green belt sites in anticipation of the RSS, most notoriously on Oldland Common. The biggest plans, though, are for "Ashton Park", a massive 10,000-house (sorry, "home") scheme south of Long Ashton. The £2.5bn development ("It's a people place!") has already been condemned by that most builder-friendly of organisations, the South West Regional Development Agency, as too conventional and without any firm commitments to sustainability. One SWRDA manager said it could be a "Bradley Stoke mark two".

The only people who got to park any tanks on the green belt so far have been Bristol City FC, whose new stadium plans have been approved in principle. All this after months of drama and wrangling over whether or not City would sell their existing Ashton Gate stadium site to Tesco. The campaign against this was another of those interesting culture clashes which Bristol produces occasionally, with football supporters on one side caricaturing their opponents in the BERATE campaign as patronising Guardian-reading snobs. BERATE disbanded after Tesco supposedly pulled out and Sainsburys stepped in, but with so much confusion, rumour and outright spin involved, this one will run and run. 'Specially since we need the new stadium if Bristol is to host any World Cup games in 2018. Note how the Council's enthusiastic support for bringing the World Cup here sort of commits them to supporting the new stadium...

It's odd really that the campaigning group with the highest profile locally was opposing Tesco in Bedminster. Nationally, the cops had predicted a "summer of rage" because of rising unemployment and popular fury at the excesses of the banks.

There was relatively little rage in Bristol. There were a couple of squats, and some of the local media got themselves all a-froth over Bristol Co-Mutiny, which was going to be something like murderous Jacobins and the Petrograd Soviet occupying a "convergence space" in the old Pro-Cathedral in Clifton. Avon & Somerset police were complaining that the organisers wouldn't talk to them, but as the Mutineers pointed out perfectly reasonably, they were anarchists, man, and didn't have any, like, leaders or organisers. In the end, this "uprising of autonomous actions" passed off peacefully, as it was always likely to. It was more like a big oppositional arts festival than a threat to capitalism. Kinda like Banksy really.

That was radical politics in Bristol in 2009. Reasonable people faced off by an establishment that really doesn't get it. So the sterling work of the People's Republic of Stokes Croft and Coexist still isn't quite trusted by the Council. But the best example was UWE student Paul Saville, who was charged with criminal damage for the hideous crime of writing lefty slogans on the pavement with chalk. The charges were later dropped.

For real rage you had to go to the wealthiest man in Bristol (according to the Sunday Times Rich List). Multi-millionaire Peter Hargreaves was considering leaving this country because of the 50p tax rate on earnings over £150,000. Hargreaves is, of course, co-founder of the spectacularly successful Hargreaves-Lansdown financial services firm. His business partner Steve Lansdown is chair of Bristol City FC, and so has uncomplainingly spent millions on Bristol.

For anger of a more toxic kind, 2009 saw a very unwelcome resurgence of race politics. The same Council meeting at which Labour relinquished power saw Cllr Shirley Brown (formerly Marshall) making a rare appearance in the chamber calling an Asian Conservative councillor a "coconut", an African/Caribbean insult meaning one who is brown on the outside, but white in the middle. The funny thing is that this barely articulate outburst comes from someone who calls herself a "motivational speaker".

Later in the year saw a disgracefully shabby bit of BBC reporting in which two young Asian reporters pretended to be a married couple and lived on the Southmead estate for several weeks. They set out to look for harassment, and indeed got it from a few kids (who would have picked on any newcomers for being ginger, overweight or in any way different) and from just a couple of real-deal racists. And so the whole of Southmead, and by extension Bristol's white working class, was tainted ... But hang on, if you believed the latest leaked membership list, the BNP has about 170 paid-up members in the former Avon, including a few in Clifton and even one in multicultural Eastville. But none in Southmead. Not one.

The overall results gained by Bristol's state secondary schools are as disappointing as ever, despite all the new schools and academies, but the devil in the detail is in the growing gulf between the educational attainment of various groups.

Perhaps the single most important document published in Bristol this year was a survey commissioned by the Council from the Institute of Community Cohesion (Icoco), showing the alarming increase in segregation among Bristol's different communities. (Read it here.)

Some 22.5% of pupils attending state schools in Bristol are from black or minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds, even though BME communities make up only 10.7% of the city's overall population. The difference is explained by factors including the arrival of people from Eastern Europe and Somalia in recent years, plus the tendency of some communities to have large families. Another important factor, however, is "white flight". About a quarter of all families in Bristol, the overwhelming majority of them white, will choose to send their children to secondary schools in neighbouring local authorities or go private.

There are scary implications in this for the increasing segregation of Bristol's schools, not just in white flight, but in the potential for tensions between different BME communities. There is also a real danger of further deteriorations in school performance, low levels of future skills and poor community cohesion. The report slated the Council for its poor performance thus far in dealing with this.

It's way easier to issue press releases about the latest environmental initiative than it is to tackle educational underachievement and community tensions. Yet this stuff matters. Take the case of Isa Ibrahim, arrested in Westbury-on-Trym last year, but found guilty this year of preparing terrorist acts. His defence brief made a convincing fist of showing him for a friendless and confused inadequate rather than a terrorist mastermind, but the fact remains that he was planning to set off a bomb, maybe in Broadmead. He was thinking about killing or maiming you and me. It was going to happen in Bristol, not London, not New York, not Islamabad or Mumbai. Bristol.

There was good news, too. While it's scant consolation to those who are unemployed, the jobless figures could be worse. Bristol is now England's fourth most popular tourism and business destination, and we've got a nice new attraction in the form of the Blue Reef aquarium.

NHS waiting lists in Bristol were the shortest they've been since records began and there was no major swine flu outbreak. And we're building the world's fastest car, and the new gold-plated Colston Hall foyer, paid for in happier times, looks great. Meanwhile, in a statistic that we've just made up, 53% of all global internet traffic in 2009 concerned the urban legend of the Bristol Zoo parking attendant who'd been secretly pocketing the money for years.

That was 2009 - the year Bristol got away with it. Instead of the summer of rage we had a winter of snow followed by the Summer of Banksy. Banksy is a white boy whose globally popular artwork has its roots in black urban culture, and all of Bristol pulls together to protect his identity from outsiders, such as the BBC TV crew who thought they'd rumbled him. Banksy is one of the few things that unites all of Bristol, and in the years to come we're going to need more of that.

SIGNS O' THE TIMES

Bristolian Andrew Blair was made redundant from his job as a construction manager in Dubai and advertised himself as available for work by writing his name and contact details on his Porsche Boxster. It sort of worked in the sense that the resulting publicity reminded the Dubai Police that they wanted him for 35 speeding offences.

Bristolian Luke Stone's daughters had flu symptoms, so he got them a Tamiflu prescription by calling the swine flu hotline. The girls rapidly recovered on Calpol anyway, and so he advertised them on eBay, even though it is illegal to sell prescription medicines. Mr Stone sold the tablets for £100 - to a newspaper reporter. Stone got his £100, the Mail on Sunday got a story, nobody dead, everyone happy.

The Bishop of Bristol advised clergy to stop passing round the communion wine because of the danger of spreading swine flu among the congregations.

North Somerset and B&NES councils have both signed up to a scheme which recycles metal from cremations. Apart from the obvious coffin fixtures, you get gold teeth, hip replacements (titanium) and other ironmongery inserted to help repair broken bones, not to mention the occasional coin (apparently). Now, with the consent of relatives, this metal will be removed from the ashes, recycled and sold with the proceeds going to charity.

Bristol solicitors Veale Wasbrough were revealed as the UK's leading lawyers in recovering unpaid school fees. The recession's hitting rich and poor alike, and private schools are having to call in the lawyers to get their money. The firm said its caseload was up by about 25% on last year and they handle "more than 2,000 debts for independent schools at any one time".

The Evening Post revealed that Bristol City Council incentivises its Civil enforcement officers (the new word for traffic wardens) by giving the team that issues the most tickets a £50 buffet, a souvenir pen and the chance to knock off work early.

Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy was appointed to spearhead Labour's social media efforts in the coming election campaign - she was immediately dubbed Labour's 'Twitter Tsar' - after a study by 'The Independent' newspaper revealed she was the most influential Twittering MP. She regularly tweets up to ten times an hour, you know.

First put up its bus fares as per bloody usual, despite near-zero levels of inflation. In an unrelated development, Trevor Smallwood OBE, a founder and former chairman of First Group and Master of Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Bristol University. It is unlikely that any of those deciding to confer this honour ever travel by bus.

Some folks in Glastonbury (where else?) objected to the town's new wi-fi hotzone. An online petition to have it removed included the traditional list of worried-well non-symptoms - "headaches, dizziness, nausea, severe tiredness, brain fog, disorientation and loss of appetite, loss of balance, inability to concentrate, loss of creativity ..." This attracted various snarky comments including "Wrap ur bodieeez in BACOFOIL! And it will protect U!" or "You people are too stupid to use the internets anyway".  The system was later removed as it had run out of funding. 

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

Wilbur, a ginger and white cat, was crushed, asphyxiated and eaten whole by the 13ft Burmese python living in the neighbours' garden in Brislington. The RSPCA scanned the offending snake and Wilbur's microchip confirmed that all of his mortal remains were indeed in there. Wilbur's owners, Martin and Helen Wadey, were appalled to discover that you can buy bloody great snakes like the python quite legally, don't need a licence of any sort, and that there is nothing the law can do about Wilbur's death. They've now started a campaign and blog at www.justiceforwilbur.co.uk

A teenager in Bradley Stoke was taken to hospital but later released after being attacked by a gang of snake-wielding scrotes. One of the reptiles bit the 14-year-old and a quick-thinking paramedic Googled snakes on his mobile to show pictures to the poor lad who identified one of the pictures as the likely culprit. The emergency control room then called Bristol Zoo which confirmed the snake was a python, and therefore not poisonous. Police later said they assumed the attack was racially motivated.

The Baltesz family in Redland were distraught when their dog Simon went missing and they tried to guide him home by sprinkling family members' dilute urine on lampposts in the neighbourhood.

EATING - IT'S THE NEW SMOKING

NHS trusts in the Greater Bristol area own 252 extra-sturdy beds as well as ten chairs and eight operating tables that can take the weight of patients of up to 40 stone. Weston Area NHS Trust spent almost £500,000 on fat furniture, while University Hospitals Bristol Trust spent £264,000.

Public Health Minister and Bristol South MP Dawn Primarolo breezed into town to launch Change4Life, a high-profile attempt to tackle Britain's obesity problem through better diet and exercise. The private sector partners in Business4Life, were brought together by the Advertising Association and include Nestle, Mars, Cadbury, Coca-Cola and Tesco.

Firefighters in the region are now having to hoist, yank, push or slide people immobilised by grotesque levels of fat on a regular basis, while ambulance services have specially adapted vehicles. A member of the National Obesity Forum, a health professionals' organisation, told the BBC: "The crews will do it but what makes me furious is that while they are lifting these people out of their baths they are not available to do their jobs because somebody has been eating themselves stupid."

The Jolly Fryer takeaway in Filton made national headlines with its Super Scooby, comprising four burgers, eight rashers of bacon, eight cheese slices and a bun (and some lettuce and relish). That's a kilo and a half of proper man-sized meat burger - 2,645 calories. You get a free can of Diet Coke if you eat it all.

LAURA NORDER

Elaine Rees, an inquiry office clerk at Trinity Road Police Station, sat close to a memorial plaque to PC Richard Hill, murdered in 1869, for eight years. It was only while researching her family tree that she realised that the man who had killed PC Hill was in fact her great, great, great uncle William Pullin. Mrs Rees, 47, organised fundraising to clean up PC Hill's grave at Arnos Vale Cemetery and laid a wreath there with police officers on the anniversary of his death.

A man and a youth, both from the Bristol area, were arrested following a bar brawl in Dawlish, Devon, involving several individuals in fancy dress. Police were called to the Welcome Family Holiday Park by stewards who said they had been attacked after trying to remove an underage drinker from the bar. They arrested a 15-year-old dressed as Spiderman, and a man in his 40s dressed as an Oompa Loompa, one of the diminutive helpers at Willy Wonka's premises in Roald Dahl's 'Charlie & The Chocolate Factory'. Eight others were arrested, including a suspect dressed as Tinky Winky off the Teletubbies, but were not detained, which sort of undermined the Daily Mirror's headline about the story: IT'S TINKY CLINKY. OOMPA-LOOMPA, SPIDERMAN AND THE TELETUBBY TINKY WINKY HELD AFTER BRAWL, it said in the Telegraph. SPIDERMAN AND OOMPA LOOMPA CAUTIONED, it said in the Evening Post, while The Sun headline read: THUMPA-LOOMPA.

Paul Cuthbert, 62, attended Taunton County Court in drag because he felt it would get him a fairer hearing. Mr Cuthbert was in a dispute with his ex-wife over the value of their former home. Speaking to reporters afterwards he said: "The judge was totally different to last time. The last time I didn't even get to have a say. She was quite nice this time."

"Last time I was in court there was my ex-wife, two female solicitors and a female judge. They put the house to auction without letting me have a say at all. So this time I thought I'd go dressed as a woman. Maybe somebody will listen to what I have to say as a woman more than they would as a man. When I went up there this morning, people just weren't recognising me as a man. One person said they had their suspicions, but they weren't sure.

"I've been singing a bit of country music, because that's what I always wanted to do, and I've made a CD with six tracks on it. I filmed myself miming to Patsy Cline with all my gear on, so you never know what the future might hold."

LOVE. IN ALL ITS MANY FORMS ...

BBC local sports reporter Pete Simson from Bedminster, took his girlfriend Hannah McDonagh to the Watershed. She thought they were just going to see a regular film, but when the lights went down the first thing on the screen was a short film of him dancing around in his underpants and asking her to marry him.

Joanne Hale was convicted of attempted murder after giving her husband Peter some horny goat weed (a herbal aphrodisiac, apparently) and luring him to Stoke Park for what he thought would be some love frolics. But after blindfolding him, she cut his throat and stabbed him, but ran off when a passer-by happened on the scene. She then drove to Bristol Parkway to meet her new lover, a man she'd met on the internet who was a bus driver and collector of military memorabilia. Character references were read out in court that said Hale was "caring, understanding and thoughtful" and had "a heart of gold" and that she often signed petitions to "save animals, the environment and the fight against crime".

Some 43 items of jewellery were auctioned for £286,000 in Salisbury in August. They had belonged to Elizabeth Charlton, who had died in 2006 aged 90 and who had left them to her daughter Marie. Mrs Charlton's impressive collection was amassed over 26 years of marriage to her businessman husband Robert, who had died in 1979. Robert Charlton gave his wife a new piece of jewellery every time he cheated on her. The largest item was a necklace with 54 diamonds which went for £50k. It's likely that Mr Charlton was unfaithful more than 43 times as the family decided to keep some of the pieces.

Haylie Hocking, 27, broke off her engagement to Jason Brake, 30, after discovering that he worked in adult movies. She only found out when a friend was looking on the internet for a male stripper for the hen party and spotted Jason going through the motions in a porn flick. "There was no way I could marry an adult film star," she said. The couple began dating last year when Jason was a customer at the garage where Haylie worked. He told her he was a personal trainer and within a few months he had moved into her flat in Bristol. He was often away at weekends, telling her that he was training clients. His true calling was only discovered when a friend showed Haylie a clip from a porn film and she realised it was him. Jason told reporters that he would be more honest with women in future relationships.

BOFFINS

Watching more than two hours of TV per day doubles children's risk of developing asthma, according to a study of 3,000 youngsters participating in Bristol's Children of the 90s survey. The results were not confined to one gender, or related to weight, but the boffins suggest that the culprit might not be TV as such, but simply inactivity.

Ant-boffins at Bristol Uni published the findings of study in which they fitted rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis) with tiny RFID tags and watched them choose between a bad nest nearby and a good nest further away. They chose the best one thanks to the efforts of scouting ants, who then persuaded everyone else to join them. The Daily Mail's coverage naturally referred to the scouts as "ESTATE AGENT ANTS".

If you were wondering why you're crap at football or darts, it could well be because you is a minger. Boffins at Bristol Uni had women rate the attractiveness of a bunch of American National Football League quarterbacks and found that the ones judged most desirable were, in fact, the best players. Meanwhile, New Scientist mag had its Twitter followers do the same thing with professional male tennis players and found a similar trend. The scientists don't claim that being a looker makes you a better player, but think it might be a genetic thing.

Bristolians were the dirtiest people in the UK and washed their hands the least, according to some survey by some company selling some hand-washing stuff.

HEADLINES OF THE YEAR

MAN HAS 40,000 YEAR OLD MAMMOTH IVORY IMPLANTED IN HIS MOUTH TO AVOID DIVORCE SETTLEMENT
- Circus of Horrors press release.

DEATH KNELL SOUNDS FOR MARMALADE MAGNATE'S MAJESTIC HORSE CHESTNUTS
- Western Daily Press, Jan 15

MING EMPEROR LINKED TO BRITISH BISCUIT DYNASTY VIA A GOLDEN CARP JAR AT BONHAMS
-  Press release from Bonhams auctioneers.

MOTORISTS THREATEN LOVESICK TOADS
- Press Release, B&NES Council. It's that toads-crossing-the-road-for-sex time of year again.

OPEN AIR SEX ACT COUPLE BANNED FROM BATH
- www.thisisbath.co.uk

DARTH VADER SALUTES JADE GOODY
- www.thisisbristol.co.uk (actor Dave Prowse sent a "message of support")

BRUNEL'S BALLS REUNITED
- Bristol Uni press release. Two giant sandstone nodules discovered when Brunel was digging a tunnel now stand together at the Uni.

WOULD YOU WEAR A SERIAL KILLER'S CARDIGAN?
- Bristol University Press Release, 9 May

BUS SHELTER IS ERECTED CLOSE TO SHOPS
- www.thisisbath.co.uk, 20 May

£300,000 SPENT FINDING OUT IF DUCKS LIKE RAIN
- Western Daily Press, 21 May

DRUGS SPREE AFTER ROW OVER GRAVY
- Evening Post, 28 May

TAILBACKS AFTER CHICKEN FEED SPILL
- www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk, Thur 11 June

APPEAL FOR RETURN OF COW'S STOLEN LEGS
- www.thisissomerset.co.uk, Wed 10 June

STUDENTS URINATE ON NEW 94 BUS
- www.thisisbloucestershire.co.uk, 18 Sept

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WERE HEADED TO BRISTOL SMUGGLED INSIDE BOUNCY CASTLES
- www.thisisbristol.co.uk 24 Sept

TO HAVE AND TOO OLD
- www.swns.com, 9 Oct. Man, 94, weds woman, 87.

DYING ALONE - IS IT ALL THAT BAD?
- Bath University press release, 28 Sept 2009