I've been disappointed by the high number of America. "academics" teaching at Scottish universities these days - if radio interviews are anything to go by. My reading has led me to form a very low opinion of US faculty members. I resent the time I've wasted finishing the drivel most of them produce. I have a theory as to why they are so piss-poor. It goes back to the Vietnam War and the fact that draft dodgers like Donald Trump could avoid service by enrolling in higher education. The demand for college and university places from spoiled rich brats meant the teaching faculties were expanded too rapidly. Folks who couldn't teach a toddler to tie a shoe lace ended up being taken on. The consequences are still with us - if you're taught by an idiot......... And as those students become professors themselves in succeeding generations the damage was perpetuated. The other sad part of this influx of Yanks is that it also suggests that like US higher education in the mid-60s through to the early 70s the Scottish system has been expanded too rapidly. No surprise these days when kids need a university degree in catering get a job laying tables in a greasy spoon cafe.

When I was a Boy Reporter, editorial and advertising were kept very strictly segregated. Things have obviously changed. Now on commercial radio I can hear a programme host interviewing some local news maker and then seconds later the same woman is extolling the services of some plumber. Can I really take anything she says seriously when she is so obviously prepared to act like a shill*? What is the price of allowing a doubt to be cast over a person's credibility and integrity? I don't think a plumber could pay me enough. In fact, no-one could pay me enough. *Shill: Accomplice of a hawker who acts an enthusiastic customer to entice others.

I'm fairly sure the author Charles Dickens was sceptical when it came to organised charities. He thought the first call on money donated was for the charity's supposed expenses. And I'm fairly sure too that a reasonably recent survey of major charities showed only about 10% of the money they collected actually went to helping people. The rest went on wages for themselves and administrative costs. It would not surprise me. Certainly, watching the charities in my area I have come to the conclusion that the welfare of those in need of help comes way second to the welfare of those employed by the charity. For instance, I don't think administrative talent is hereditary, so mother-daughter management teams causes my eyebrow to raise. Now I'm sure there are some genuine charities out there who really do want to help and don't use other people's misfortunes to line their own pockets. So, how about this - to be a registered charity an organisation must pay no more than minimum wage to any of its employees. That should weed out a lot of the profiteers. As one man who genuinely wanted to help once said There's A Lot Of Money In Poverty.

A while back an acquaintance asked me to help shift a table from her flat to ground floor of her towerblock. Why not. It would get my good deed of the day done before lunch. Now, a lot of people would show their appreciation with a five dollar bill - less than the cost of a pint of beer these days. I'd decided to reject the offer. It's not a good deed if you get paid. But there was no offer. I think she'd mentioned I wasn't the first person she'd asked that morning to help move that table. Maybe the others had helped her move tables before.

There have been a lot of exiles on my radio recently -Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Lebanon. The thing is that many of them don't represent opinion or feeling in their home countries. They are not drawn from the massive columns of refugees crowded at border fleeing war or an oppressive regime with all their possessions balanced on their heads. They are mainly from the most privileged sections of society and in some cases have had to leave their country because they were involved in trying to reinstall a nasty right-wing regime. A number of Iranian exiles were on the radio lamenting the supposed ceasefire in Iran. They wanted the airstrikes to continue until the Islamic regime is ousted. Easy for them to demand. Back in Iran there were certainly people who initially welcomed the attacks. Then they realised that the American plan is to free them by trying to kill them. Now they are not so keen. I wish the radio would stop giving these privileged, usually politically extremist, exiles so much of a platform.

I just heard a crime drama in which Tyneside had apparently become part of Yorkshire. Not a single Geordie accent. I know not everyone in the area has a discernible Geordie accent, but no-one at all of them. Maybe that was one of the reason the London-based producer of The Black Museum, Harry Towers, failed in the early 1950s to interest the BBC in broadcasting the programme. Another reason might be the scriptwriters' bizarre habit of putting American words into the mouths of British characters. No-one in London would have spoken about sidewalks, wrenches or streetcars. I was also baffled as to why Scotland Yard would be involved in investigating an 1857 murder in Glasgow. But I do know that trial would not have involved only 12 jurors. So, a lack of research may also have put the BBC off buying the drama. Even the involvement of Orson Welles in the project counted for nothing so far as the BBC was concerned. My wee brother tells me the programme, set in the UK and first broadcast in America, was recorded in Australia using local actors.

I heard two writers on the radio discussing the extra barriers they face when it came to getting published due to their humble "working class" origins. Certainly folk from privileged backgrounds seem to have an easier time. I think both attributed their success to their own talent. Maybe so. But maybe not entirely. One was black and the other a transsexual. Two easy checkboxes for publishers who want to claim some diversity credentials.

Well, the British have finally changed the clocks and I'm not being subjected any longer to the BBC's dreadful Outlook radio programme. This year the clocks in North America went an hour ahead three weeks earlier than the Brits. The radio feed is on a timer, 6am, and that meant Outlook - with some tagline about personal stories - instead of the news. Outlook used to be a case of interesting tales if true. Sadly, too many of them were not true. There were so many red flags that the production team should have given them a wide berth. A good rule of thumb is that if something doesn't make sense, that's because it's probably not true. I checked out one of the programme's Canadian stories and it was so full of holes it could be filed under Collander. Outlook has changed. Now the stories are more likely to be true but the subjects are so boring that no reasonable person cares about them. I tried several times to listen to a full episode but I can't remember now whose story was being recounted when I switched off. The subjects were that tiresome and boring. 

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.