A pack of cards

Dear Solly, we have decided not to send you a Christmas card this year but to spend the marketing budget on buying a goat in Africa with the money we've saved....with love from your client.
Dear client - I'm happy not to get a mass produced Christmas card signed by Debbie in accounts who I've never met. But f**k the goat and spend the money on increasing our fees which haven't changed in more than five years - love Solly
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What is the collective noun for tabloid hacks? A galley of reporters perhaps. A pack of cards more like.
 A veritable rabble of journos rolled up at the Mail on Sunday's Christmas party for contributors in posh Kensington on Tuesday night with loads of free champagne, nibbles and anecdotes. So that's where the money goes.
 There's one thing such a group (a composition of reporters?) does well and that is tell stories and it was one of the nicest evenings I've spent with old friends in years.
 True, many are now once-a-year acquaintances unfortunately, but it was good to bump into the multi talented Shekhar 'I can't believe it's not' Bhatia who writes for everyone from Eastern Eye to the Evening Standard and 'Our Man In Paris' Peter Allen who has some deliciously juicy gossip about Sarkozy that you suspect will only be printed once the little man pops his men-be-taller Chelsea boots.
 Then there is the eternal Shan Lancaster, the first person who ever paid me a tip fee when I was a junior reporter on the Ilford Recorder and she was on The Sun. Something to do with Rod Stewart's house in Epping as I recall. And I got paid.
 That was over 25 years ago and it helped persuade me that my future was not on Insight on The Sunday Times or as a foreign correspondent for The Observer but that I really did belong on a mass circulation  tabloid. But like many of us gathered in High Street Ken on Monday night, we represented a generation who also knew when to get out while the going was good.
 Shan's other half is a wonderful photographer called Roger Bamber who has spent the last couple of decades taking arty shots for the likes of The Guardian but during the 1970s was regularly taking pictures of Page Three girls for The Sun including, I was genuinely shocked to learn, 'Pussy Week In The Sun' in which each day a different girl was photographed with, yes, a cat.
 However, what I hadn't realised was that this caused a strange retail phenomenon. Hundreds of girls in those days wanted to be page three models and all were told to turn up to a Sun audition with their own cat. Which meant that all over the country, pet shops were besieged by busty young beauties buying kittens.
 If that was today, The Mail would probably report it as kind of strange feline cult leaving animal welfare charities bemused.
 Now I know what the word is. A fabrication of tabloid journalists.
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According to the Daily Mail more than 5,000 people have complained about the outrageously sexy outfits and routines by Christina Aguilera and Rhianna on X Factor on Saturday night.
And if you didn't see the disgusting outfits and poses that has outraged the Mail, then the paper has helpfully provided pictures of them across the whole of pages 5 and 6 of the paper and will repeat them several times over the next few days and online. Just make sure you don't look at them before the 9pm watershed.
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Banks are busy at lunchtimes. Who'd have thought it? Well, not HSBfreakingC in Holborn, that's for sure. Rant over.
Toodle pip...Solly