I realise Her Majesty has had yet another ‘orrible year, because she had to deal with Helen Mirren taking over her role, but is that any reason to continually overlook one of her loyal subjects? What do I have to do to gain Her Royal acknowledgement?

I have worked for the State (being with State Insurance for five years) and allowed my brain to be on tap at the city council. I delivered Her Royal Mail for two different periods in my career. Like Her forebear Henry VIII, I’m a minor composer, writing my first song worth remembering when I was only a teenager.

I have written countless songs since then, some of which have been performed.

While accompanying four opera singers, I played the piano in front of thousands of schoolchildren around New Zealand, even continuing to play one day after the lid of the grand piano at Tokomairiro High School fell on my thumb – mid-aria.

I have accompanied a pre-Dame Kiri te Kanawa, too. She condescendingly told me (and I put it down to her youth at the time) that everyone makes mistakes sometimes. (I assume she meant in the way I played the music, rather than in my choice of singer.)

I have listened to more music than all the 18th century composers wrote in total, much of it with my full attention. This music has run the gamut from the extremely incomprehensible (like that by John Cage, who to me seemed to be opaque in everything he wrote) to the totally sublime.

I have sold goods door to door, and collected money door to door, so you could easily count me as being a community worker.

I wrote my first play before I was out of my teens, and two later ones which I destroyed, since, like Brahms, I didn’t want my juvenilia undermining the fruit of my later genius.

I have submitted over 300 articles to various publishers not only in my own country, but in the United Kingdom (of Her Majesty) and the United States. Two-thirds of them have been published.

You’d think in the midst of Her Majesty’s Majestic Year she would have noticed one of those, surely? Furthermore, I have read more books than are sold at the Regent Book Sale in Dunedin each year – many of them cover to cover.

Like Paul’s adopted son, Timothy, I have been a Christian from my youth up. I have worked twice for my church in paid capacities, quite apart from the countless hours I’ve spent shifting other members’ furniture from one house to another, (and back again), and attending pot luck meals, and listening to those who were going through difficult patches.

I have watched thousands of movies, and untold hours of television – an endurance test in itself. That any person should endure so much and still be ignored each year is beyond my comprehension.

I have enjoyed book-keeping, experienced economics, been entranced by English and bewildered by maths. I have even studied Trachtenberg’s system of multiplication, the one he conceived in prison without any paper, and am still unable to multiply multiple numbers. I can read some Italian, some German and some text messages.

I have lived in a house with five teenagers.

With all these credentials (and many more I can’t fit in due to modesty), I ask you: Why wasn’t my name in the Honours List this year?