The Gordon Highlanders are now a thing of the past, rolled firstly with the Queen's Own Highlanders into a regiment unimaginatively dubbed "The Highlanders" in 1994 and then absorbed into the Royal Regiment of Scotland in 2006. But I wonder what the soldiers of that proud Highland regiment would have made of  civil servant Miss A Adams at the Foreign Office referring to them in a memo as the "Gay Gordons" and noting to their "prancing" at public events. Adams raised no objection to a request for the Gordons to take part in a 1984 ceremony to mark Nelson Mandela being given the Freedom of Aberdeen. But a Foreign Office superior did object. Margaret Thatcher and her cronies were worried about offending the racist thugs who ran South Africa. Westminster could not stop Aberdeen giving a man they regarded as a Communist terrorist the honour but the London Government could stop the Gordons being part of the celebrations. It's hard to know what is the most disgusting facet of this tale: - a civil servant who suggests a British Army battalion was prone to prancing around and who links homosexuality to mincing behaviour, the thinly disguised pro-Apartheid stance of the British Government or how badly informed that government was about Nelson Mandela. At least the Adams was, one presumes, trying to be funny. But I wonder if she had met a couple of members of the regiment in a pub whether she would have referred to it as the Gay Gordons and discussed their supposed predilection for prancing. Although the regiment's officers before the First World War may well have delighted to be known by the debutantes as the "Gay Gordons", I suspect by the 1980s there was less pride shown in the appellation.