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.