Now that’s what I call a college Christmas song

It’s that time of year when magazines produce their Christmas gift guides. FErret will be recommending only one product, however: NEW College’s Christmas single.

Titled All the Broken Toys at Christmas, and performed by Batteries Not Included, it’s a charming, nostalgic pop-punk tour of 1980s toy favourites, with shout-outs to Hungry Hippos and Buckaroo, as well as the surprisingly existential line, “I’m sitting in a slipper on the Hot Wheels track of life”.

Students at the Worcestershire college helped out with an animated video, the highlight of which is perhaps a toy Arnold Palmer spanking Barbie with golf clubs.

While FErret hopes his endorsement boosts sales, as proceeds will go to the deaf-blind charity Sense, there are signs that the media tutor behind the song, Sean Macreavy, may be setting his sights too high. “We are about to gain national BBC airplay and many people think it should be Christmas No 1,” he says. “Many people” is perhaps a euphemism for his mother: at the time of going to press, the song was in 1,239th place on Amazon’s charts.

We’ve had a Yale of a time, but now it’s over

There were celebrations across the Atlantic from Yale alumni now that nearly two decades of improbable confusion between a Welsh FE college and the famous Ivy League university are coming to an end.

Yale College in Wrexham is merging with Deeside College to become Coleg Cambria next summer, prompting relief in Connecticut, where the university still uses the term Yale College to refer to its undergraduate school.

In 2000, when Yale University finally noticed that the Welsh college had taken its name seven years earlier, it sent an “aggressive and threatening” legal letter. The FE college was forced to officially style itself Yale College Wrexham, in the same way that 1990s indie rockers Suede became The London Suede stateside.

Now Connecticut can have the name of Wrexham-born benefactor Elihu Yale to itself, leaving FErret only to reflect on the (perhaps apocryphal) claim that the university’s real philanthropist was a man called Jeremiah Dummer, but that trustees baulked at the name Dummer College.