Carlos Alba

No two words are capable of striking visceral, Pavlovian fear in a young mind, than the soubriquet assigned to the man who briefly stalked a Glasgow dancehall in the late 1960s to make butchered corpses of three, bright young women who had their whole lives ahead of them.

While the Tartan Army merrily satirises our dire footballing performances, the response among too many Scots to the country’s failures in other areas is to shrug and accept them as inevitable. The waters are muddied by unionist politicians like Gordon Brown who continue to peddle worn-out sophisms about how the country’s many problems can be overcome by continued constitutional tinkering which would still leave the main centres of industry, commerce, and fiscal control in the south-east of England.

When prospective MPs and MSPs go to Politician School, it seems the first lesson they are taught is the holy trinity of political excuses.

When 50 or more Scottish writers gather to address an issue of pressing public concern, you know it’s time to look to the skies, imagine the vast expanse of the universe and consider the infinite multitude of more important things you could be thinking about.

It was the kind of searing, humid summer’s day when lifelong memories are forged, when the sights, sounds and the pulsating sensations were the building blocks of an unforgettable experience.

This week the scandal reaches its denouement, with the appearance at the public inquiry of Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, upon whose watch more than 1,100 postmasters were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting.

Natalie Elphicke is not your run-of-the-mill politician. Where others see potentially career-ending scandal, humiliation and failure, Natalie sees only opportunity.

Today porn is everywhere, instantly available and ubiquitous A study published last year revealed that a third of nine-year-olds had unintentionally accessed porn. And the problem is with rather the habits it generates.

The past 10 days has been like an episode from The Thick of It that was never screened because it was considered too far-fetched. For Holyrood bubble, navel gazing, rectum auto-accessing, self-serving arrogance, it will take come beating.

The stratospheric levels of support for Labour in England, indicated in polls, are not replicated north of the border, and some even suggest the SNP could yet win the highest number of Scottish seats at the forthcoming General Election.