Contains: Here is the nudes..laid bare on an MP’s bed, Angus’ own goal, and facing the final curtain McCain’s way
A version of this appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on September 4 2018

Here’s a test that may give away your age as surely as calling music “albums” or recalling the hexagonal pencil kept in the glove box solely to rewind cassettes whenever a tape got chewed by the car deck: imagine you have to make a shopping list or remember a phone number.
If you have already tapped a note onto your phone, then you are the kind of fresh young thing who cannot remember a world before Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Radio 2.
If on the other hand, you have pockets full of scrawled scrap paper and Post-Its, then you are sufficiently venerable to remember a simpler time when Chris Evans used to tender his resignations by not turning up to work for three weeks, calling the station controller useless and then jetting out to Las Vegas to marry Billie Piper.

Should there be handwringing over the slow death of handwriting? Today, most adult composition takes place at a keyboard, and even education experts who would like to see more classroom time devoted to writing, are unconvinced of the need to teach students two entirely different styles of handwriting.
In an age of tapping touchscreens or dictation via voice-recognition software, the Scottish Qualifications Authority have announced they will be phasing out handwritten exams over the next ten years. Other places are even further down the road: Finland has already dropped handwriting from its schools’ curriculum, as have many American states.

Yet while writing by hand is a more unusual skill, it is also becoming more highly prized. Before acting career and a royal marriage, Meghan Markel was able to make a living as a freelance calligrapher with high profile clients prepared to pay hundreds of pounds for complicated cursive invitations as a sign of hand-crafted cool.

No one argues that every schoolchild in Scotland should be trained in medieval script in order to check the 1707 Act of Union for loopholes, but there is something about the manual rather than the automatic that suggests authenticity and tangible effort.
There’s no going back to all of our antique artisan skills — and why would you want to sit arms-length from the TV in order to change channels, forage through a packet of Rice Krispies in order to get the toy, snap the 43 adapter into the centre of singles on a record player, or have to wait for someone to call back if you missed a phone call. Sometimes for days? The move to a speedier, simpler tap-and-swipe rather than push-and-heave culture is mostly a positive one, especially for the time-poor, the non-technical or the shoogly.
People adapt to progress by calculating the gains and losses, and coming up with solutions or compensations. There’s no need to mock a generation for growing up without having to get up at 9am on a Saturday morning to see children’s TV and British wrestling. But at the same time, being able to wind a wristwatch, handle MS DOS on a black and white computer screen, or knowing which solvent removes biro ink from fingers and shirts should not be discounted as valuable ancient expertise. Come the zombie apocalypse, you might need us.

RIP Grouchos. As the V&A opens up in Dundee, the city’s oldest and greatest record shop has reached the end of its groove.
Everyone who grew up in the Juteopolis has had at least one rake through Groucho’s vinyl and CDs racks, but not everyone has the moxie of the lad who wanted to sell some of his old CDs, and when asked to prove he was over 16, produced a fag packet.

I used to think that, given notice of having a certain length of time to live, I’d like to host my own wake. Good friends, good chat, and a day off work? It seems a shame to miss out when you could invite yourself along instead as a last-minute surprise guest.
For almost a year, Senator John McCain held weekly meetings planning his own ceremony, as a statement about political union and harmony, through the presence of Presidents Obama and Bush and the notable absence of Donald Trump, before the Vietnam war hero’s casket was carried out of an Arizona church to the strains of My Way.

Frank Sinatra’s number is a big favourite in the recently-departed hit parade with Robbie Williams’ Angels running it a close second, although I’ve been to a service where they played out with The Jam’s Going Underground, and watch the pallbearers at another final farewell struggle to keep time with Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.
However, in the words of the Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, especially if you rely on CDs. For the funeral of an easy-listening older relative, Unforgettable was requested from Nat King Cole’s Greatest Hits. Alas, during the final moments at the crematorium something skipped, and the track we all heard instead was The Christmas Song, with its famous opening suggestion of chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

“Another season and BBC Scotland showing football from a neighbouring country,” complains nationalist MP Angus B MacNeil when Match of the Day rolled out on Saturday night. “Scottish TV licenses could be and maybe should subsidising other leagues too.”

Everyone else knows that they already do. It’s called Sportsound, and screens on Sunday evenings.
It’s also remarkable that a former Shadow Spokesperson for Culture, Media and Sport believes that Scottish football fans only want to watch Scottish football. But perhaps the member for the Western Isles has secret evidence that independence will make Scottish football better.
“A Bore is Starred”, quipped one review when Barbra Streisand led the 1976 remake. Now it’s the turn of Lady Gaga to play the ingénue talent in the fourth version of the hokey story.
This time however, there seems to be some top trolling at work from co-star/writer/director Bradley Cooper, since her starlet starts off as a soulful torch singer of La Vie En Rose before selling out to become a glitzy pop artist like, erm, Lady Gaga.

Also RIP: the Sunday Herald which came off the presses just as the BBC launched their new drama Press on the small screen.
The six-parter show showcases Ben Chaplin as the editor of the tabloid Post and Charlotte Riley as the news editor of rival (fictional) broadsheet The Herald, barking out things like “our job is the truth” instead of “I had a tube of Jaffa cakes on this desk last night, where did they go?”

It’s hard to tell from the trailer whether the series is going to be as pungently authentic as Aunty’s newsroom drama State of Play, or as comically awful as the film version of State of Play, which at one point asked viewers to believe that Russell Crowe’s waddly reporter could outrun a military-trained assassin.
TV and print newsrooms seem to fascinate writers, in a way that radio newsrooms do not. This is a shame, because radio does have its arresting moments, not least when one MP agreed to link up live to the early morning radio news via Skype from his house. However instead of selecting “audio”, he pressed the video button, transmitting live images of him sitting half-shaved and naked on the end of his bed to a startled studio.

