I'm a little bit baffled why these days news programme presenters thank the reporters on sir for their stories. Surely, these reporters have been paid for their contribution and are just doing their jobs. They didn't file the story out of the goodness of their hearts. Mind you, maybe I expect more from people when it comes to doing their jobs properly than others do. Years ago I was an employee of the year. That meant I was a member of the judging panel for the coming year's employee of the month. At the first meeting I felt most of the candidates for the employee of the month award were basically only doing the job they were paid for. I wasn't invited back for any other judging panel meetings.

I'm not a fan of Lallans. I think the problem is that there's no such language. I've heard folk on the radio, poets in particular, who tend to think that all they have to do is substitute as many English words with Scots dialect ones as they can. The problem is the dialect words are plucked willy-nilly from across Scotland. No single person would naturally use all those words in one sentence. There are many varieties of Lowland speech. Welding them all together into one supposed language, Lallans, comes across as fake and affected.

There's a radio programme called the Urbanist. For the past fortnight it was unavailable here. That didn't make me sad. The programme often makes me angry. It usually interviews architects and others involved in city development. The reality of this world is Grenville Towers and 72 dead. Most folk I know are victims of supposed urban developers rather than being better off thanks to them. These people very seldom make ordinary people's lives better. And yet I don't think I've ever heard the programme's presenters ever ask a tough question. The only criticisms of urban planning come from interviewees trying to differentiate themselves from their competitors. I suspect the presenters' reticence may be linked to the fact that much of the programme's content comes from international conferences and perhaps no-one wants to jeopardise the flow of invitations.

It seems criminal greed may run deeply in the British Royal Family. It would appear that Prince Andrew did not think the British public were giving him enough money via the Royal List. Nearly everyone knows that Duke of Windsor's reputation was heavily tainted by allegations of Nazism. But how many know of his Mafia association? A royal lifestyle in France didn't come cheap for the former King Edward VII. So, perhaps it would be tempting to start building up an unofficial retirement fund when appointed Governor of the Bahamas in 1940. The Mafia wanted to open casino resorts in the Bahamas, along the same lines as operations familiar in Cuba and Las Vegas. When a major opponent of the casino developments was brutally murdered, Windsor stopped the local police investigation, involving experienced British officers, and brought in two American police detectives who promptly set about destroying much of the evidence. One of them was definitely on the Mafia's payroll. But was the Duke? If the smoke and mirrors surrounding his alleged Nazi links are anything to go by, I suspect we'll never know.

Once, when I lived in Shetland, I failed to meet singer/songwriter Elvis Costello. Most Saturday afternoons I used to go out for a couple of beers with my roommate Louis. But one Saturday afternoon there was an old film on Channel 4 that I'd always wanted to see. So I gave the Thule Bar a miss. Louis was away a long long time, way longer than our usual Saturday afternoon sesh. When he did come home it turned out he'd spent the afternoon drinking with Elvis Costello. Costello and his wife at the time had been on a North Atlantic cruise ship which had stopped off in Lerwick Harbour to let the passengers stretch their legs on land. Louis said Costello was a really nice guy and had promised the people drinking in the Thule that he would try to return to Shetland to play at the local folk festival. Not only did he keep that promise but he also did indeed prove to be a decent bloke. His acoustic set was no longer than anyone else's playing at the festival; no special treatment. And if he hadn't already been a star you would have known from his performance that he was going to be one.

One thing I can't get to do in Canada is drone in on the pub about old children's TV programmes. You won't be surprised to learn that as a Brit, I didn't watch the same kids' programmes as the Canadians around the pub table. Which is a shame. There's nothing like old television to bring people together. With only three channels in the Central Belt when I was young, there was a lot of viewing in common. For example, there were no characters on Captain Pugwash called Roger the Cabin Boy, Master Baites or Seaman Staines. Nowadays it's not just geography that has cut the TV common ground from under our feet. There's the million channel universe and added streaming to pretty much guarantee that few people watched the same programmes the night before. Which, again, is more than somewhat of a shame.

So, the United States Justice Department knew that it was possible that Labour Eminence Gris Peter Mandelson was selling cabinet- privileged British banking information to American banker Epstein And yet they kept it to themselves. British police only began investigating the allegation after the American authorities publicly released three million pages of what they call The Epstein Files. I call it a disgrace. Mandelson, always a deeply unpleasant character, was the British ambassador in Washington. Perhaps the Americans were blackmailing him while he was in Washington. Either that or the DoJ has no real interest in catching bad guys. Knowing the American Government and their now open contempt for the British, demonstrated in 2019 when they spirited a killer motorist out of England during Trump's first reign, one has to wonder how it is GCHQ and the rest of the Surveillance Society managed to miss what Mandelson was allegedly doing in betraying Cabinet secrets by email. I would have thought in view of how unreliable the Yanks are, that was exactly the kind of thing what we pay them to do.

Where in Edinburgh is The Golden Mile? According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the population of Scotland was queued up down it to invest their savings in the disastrous Darien Scheme of the late 1690s. The programme was Nobody Saw It Coming. It claims to reveal little known but world shaking events. So, their English expert had to claim that Darien has been airbrushed from Scottish history. I seem to remember it was taught in high school as one of the main reasons for the 1707 Treaty of Union. But how would someone educated in England know that? Nobody Saw It Coming started out as quite a promising series but as it goes on the claims being made and the quality of the research are becoming increasingly dubious. The Darien episode has moved it to possibly the worst ABC programme rebroadcast in Canada. But that's only because ABC sensibly recently axed the obnoxious Stop Everything. The English supposed expert was an archaeologist from the Royal Agricultural University. Stick to digging for spuds mate.

I was a little baffled when I learned that adults were queuing up to be diagnosed with autism. I know a number of parents want their children to be somehow special even if they are not - but adults? Then I found out that social media is telling folk that many of history's geniuses, your da Vincis and Einsteins, would almost certainly be diagnosed these days as being on the autism spectrum. Suddenly it all made sense. By the way, I do believe in autism but suspect that there have been some dodgy diagnoses made in the past.

It turned out that the reporters at the Edmonton Sun were paying for a management spy out of their own pockets. Every year there was a Story of the Year award. It was usually a team effort and the prize money was shared between the reporters involved. The winners usually included one guy who as far as I knew had contributed nothing. But I wasn't involved, so how would I know? Then there was a winning story I was involved in that I knew this guy had made no meaningful contribution. But around then the guy had blown his cover anyway. There was a leaving do at a pub at which it became clear that the reason for the departure was a certain boss. Many others at the pub that night had their own stories about this boss guy's incompetence and sexual harassment. Next day the big boss knew a lot about what was said in the pub. But the odd thing was he only knew what was said after a certain person arrived at the pub - you guessed it, the fellah who regularly shared in the prize money pot despite not working on the winning story of the year. It turned out one of the perks of being a management spy was being put on the list of prize winners for Story of the Year. If he hadn't been, then the real contributors would have one less person to split the prize money with.

When I was an underage drinker I was surprised that I wasn't challenged more by the bar staff. Maybe they simply didn't care. But as someone who is now legally classed as an adult I wonder how well a bar full of teenagers would do financially. We were not big spenders. I knew one guy who at 16 used to drink in the same pub as a lot of the teachers. They may even have had beers with him. I wish they could see how he turned out. Hanging out with the kind of guys who leach off kids in a pub isn't a good start in life. As I say, an older guy now, I wonder how we got away with it. I suspect it might have been that to adult most folk under 20 years old look 15 and you can't turn 'em all away. The thing is that teenagers like to be different - though not getting-picked-on different. Anyway they adopt bands and stuff like that as tribal totems. And if you recognise the band name on the Tshirt, or whatever, you can pretty work out how old a person is from their musical taste, or whatever. But a person over-21 and working in bar wouldn't be able to consistently spot the tells.

I shouldn't laugh, coz it's no laughing matter. You know some people used to think they drove better with a few drams in them? Well, this New Year gave me pause for thought. There was a lot of traffic on the roads after The Bells. The thing was that I had never seen everyone driving with much care and consideration. I suspect they were driving safely coz they didn't want involved in any accidents that might resulted in them being breath-tested. This morning things were back to normal with folk going through red lights, etc. Some of these folks are such good drivers they get in collisions with trains.  I say drinking and driving is no laughing matter coz it killed my grandpa's brother. Multiple millions of Germans had failed to finish him off when he went into action as paratrooper during the Second World War but one Yank did for him in 1957.

I forgot to run a teaser last week reminding you that the 2025 Book of the Year was being announced today. So, if you please, internal drumroll sound in your head. After a strong start to the year although the general quality of the books reviewed was good, the shortlist came down to only three titles. The first contender was SAS Operation Storm about the defence of the Omani fishing village of Mirbat in 1972. For an SAS book to make the shortlist is unusual because most are what I term War Porn. Co-author Roger Cole was there as an SAS trooper while Richard Belfield is a skilled writer. Between them they delved into a rich vein of information. The second contender was The Korean War by old favourite, and old soldier, Tim Carew. This book from 1967 was a joy to read with the often grim stories from the Commonwealth contingent brightened with sudden splashes of humour. Number Three in the running was Robert Kershaw's balanced and insightful look at the 1944 fighting in Arnhem through the prism of one street. At the end of the day it came down to Mirbat or Korea. The tie- breaker was a stupid claim that the Strikemaster jets at Mirabet were armed with submachine guns. So, Korea wins.

I think Thanksgiving is a great idea. A public holiday where all you have to do is count your blessings and be grateful. Here in Canada there's usually a big family gathering and meal. Our taxpayer funded state broadcaster CBC has a new, and usually crap, call-in programme called Just Ask Me in which dim members of the public phone in their opinions in the belief that they constitute a question to a subject expert. An interesting idea very poorly executed. Anyway, the expert was a woman and the subject was how to please everyone at Thanksgiving Dinner. The problem was she hated Thanksgiving and thought anyone who celebrated it was a colonialist fascist. With such a party pooper on the end of the line, hardly anyone phoned in. Whoever booked this fantastically stupid boorish woman for the call-in should have been fired. And whoever hired the booker, also obviously a stupid person, should go as well and quite possibly their boss too should be terminated well for being so  chronically incompetent. Whatever happened to the old The Buck Stops Here? 

I hadn't realised how brilliant Lord Mountbatten was until I saw the wartime information film Burma Victory. Not. The whole film was a Mountbatten vanity project. I'm not sure now that the real architect of the British Empire 's victory of the Japanese in Burma, William Slim, even got a mention. Slim at least knew his left from his right. Which is more than can be said for the odious Mountbatten. It has been said, with only some exaggeration, that Mountbatten's South East Asia Command headquarters in Ceylon, had more personnel than the 14th Army in Burma. But the Americans liked working with a Real Life English Dook. And maybe that counted for something. By the way, I understand there are two versions of Burma Victory. One celebrates the reconquest of Burma. The American version celebrates how swell they and their Chinese allies are.

I've seen a couple of photos of young women murdered in Scotland over the past few months - obviously plucked from so-called social media. I can't work out whether the girls have been victims of badly botched plastic surgery or have used some kind of creepy inadequate Internet photo filter that for some reason they think makes them look more attractive. Now, I know what's considered pretty changes from decade to decade but when did the bad botox horror look come in? Is there are crazy incompetent plastic surgeon working for dead cheap in central Scotland? I hope not. I hope what a saw was down to flawed photo software.

Several years ago I was forced to read a history of North American Indians called The Inconvenient Indian by an American writer based in Canada called Thomas King who was marketed as indigenous. By the end I thought I Could Have Written That. So, I decided to look into King's credentials as an indigenous writer. He turned out to be a privileged Greek kid from California who had been told his deadbeat dad was of Cherokee descent. OK, but if he hung out with his Cherokee grandparents during the school holidays.... Nope, no evidence of that even. King has just admitted he has no Cherokee blood. He gave the impression this "revelation" followed a report from a family tree specialist he had commissioned. In fact, a US group that specialises in exposing Pretendians had called him up to answer some questions raised by their research. Now there is a big fuss here among the chattering classes. But I can't understand why. I'm a great believer in nurture being more important than nature. Was King supposed to have some deep rooted racial knowledge buried in his DNA that made him indigenous? That's surely pure racism. Turns out he was just a little Greek-American who decided he was an Indian. Good career move. A number of what I consider Professional Indians have said King's confession has not come as a surprise. So, why didn't they call him out? Put it this way, people in glass houses know they shouldn't throw stones.

I think maybe perhaps it's time the Royal Family decided to implement a ban on sex with citizens of the United States of America. It often doesn't turn out very well. Edward VIII stopped being Edward VIII so he could marry the obnoxious Wallis-Simpson. Constitutional Crisis negotiated but the abdication tainted with later Nazi overtones. Did he really mean when he declared Something Must Be Done during a visit to some economically distressed part of England that all the Jews should be killed? Then we have the present family rift following Prince Harry's marriage to the toxic Meghan Markle. Yet another American divorcee - will they never learn? Prince Nice-but-Dim simply married someone just like his mother. Now Prince Andrew is no longer Prince Andrew because of sex parties in America set up by Robert "The Bouncing Czech" Maxwell's daughter and her creepy boyfriend. Double trouble mixing with a Maxwell and teenage American girls.

Most folk like to get some praise. Some even seek it. But I remember when I worked at the Government of Saskatchewan and someone praised the daily news summary that I'd prepared for the morning meeting. They meant well. But I just knew that the colleague who prepared the summary on alternate weeks would interpret this as a criticism of her. And it was my life she would make more difficult as result. And I was correct. I sometimes wonder if senior management praise for the Campbeltown Courier's coverage of the Mull of Kintyre Chinook Crash led my then-boss to undermine me and make my job as editor more difficult than it had to be was an example of something similar. Only, she was motivated by fear that I would get her job and wasn't just being petty.

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