Our honours are filled with people at their best

We freely admit that our News Year Honours are not quite as prestigious as the MBEs and OBEs that will be made public tonight. We can’t offer monetary gain, nor give our recipients the ability to put letters after their name, which may impress people when booking into hotels and so on.

But we run the ‘honours’ each year for several reasons, all of which are important.

Firstly, they are a genuine thank you from us, on behalf of our readers, to those who are a force for good. Just like the Queen’s honours, being a force for good may mean being skilled at your job, as PC Khurram Masood certainly is.

It may be bestowed for a single act of heroism or altrusim, as we have seen this year with Jon Thornber who dashed into the Nelson Avenue house which had just exploded after a gas problem.

It may be defined as throwing yourself into helping others, as is the case with Leane Stevenson and Hayley Wheeler, or it may come under the bracket of fundraising for the good of the wider community – step forward Elizabeth Humphries and Paul Smith. But each and every one of our 10 recipients has done something out of the ordinary.

Another reason we like to give out the honours is that they act as a pleasant aide memoire to the previous year.

They are a recollection of stories we have covered in the last 12 months that have raised spirits – and goodness knows this has been another year when we have needed a tonic.

And the final reason is that we’d like to end the year on a high. Our job as a newspaper is to highlight what is happening in our area, which sadly is often not welcome news.

But here we see proof that community spirit is alive and well – and for that we thank them all.