Last Saturday night I was going to hit the town. We were going to the world premiere of a brand-new movie. Stars and celebrities would arrive to the oohs and aahs of the waiting star-struck masses. As we traipsed over the red carpet the cameras would flash. Barry Norman might want me to say a few words. I would say a few and then wave to the masses as I sauntered into the theatre with my lover of 40 years. I was done up to the nineties. In fact, I was done up to the millennium. A natty dress suit that our American cousins would call a tuxedo. My partner had bought me a multicoloured bow tie. I was a teeny bit disappointed it didn't revolve like a wee propeller. Along with it came a similar patterned piece of material that tied around the midriff and was called a camyerbum, or something like that.

I spent some time on my toiletries. A close shave. Shampoo. Some aftershave that had lain about unused for a year or two. I draped casually round my shoulders a white silk scarf that someone had given me as a Christmas pressie in the eighties and had lain unworn in a drawer. I perused myself in the mirror and, kid you not, I looked like a fuller-bodied Fred Astaire, only more graceful, a trifle raffish. But, as they say; pride comes before a fall, and I fell. Walking down the path to the waiting taxi, I slipped on some ice and broke my ankle, though I didn't know it at the time. The taxi driver helped me into his cab and drove us into town. In the meantime my ankle had swollen. When he opened the door I more or less fell out and crawled into the theatre on my hands and knees. To make matters worse there was no red carpet. No star-struck fans. No Barry Norman. This was the Winter Garden Rothesay.

To make matters worse, more than half the men there were in lounge suits and the guest of honour, Lord ''Dickie'' Attenborough, was dressed like an ex-Aldermaston marcher.

As I was being helped to my feet people were muttering ''the cad is inebriated'', while I tried to explain to all and sundry that bevvy hadn't passed my lips since Ne'erday. Willing hands dragged me to the table where we were to nosh. The pain subsided. By this time I was having some well-earned and rather cheeky Italian plonk. If I was to skid on ice on my way home I wanted to be fortified against the pain. The food was excellent. The speeches magnificent. Johnny Beattie, another Govanite, has a house in Rothesay. In a sense Bute has always been Govan's garden suburb. Johnny works hard for the island and for good causes throughout Scotland. He also told a marvellous surrealist joke. A young man sporting a Mohican haircut with multicoloured tufts running over the centre of his scalp was crossing the street. An old man looked at him with incredulity. The young man says aggressively: ''Whit

ur ye lookin' it?'' The old man replies: ''Some years ago I had sex with a parrot and I'm just wonderin if you're the offspring.''

The star of the evening, of course, was Lord Attenborough, who also has a house on the island and has obviously fallen in love with the place. He's a thoroughly decent man. His film, Grey Owl, was being premiered and is about the life of a North American Indian who came to Britain in the 1930s with what was basically the message that man must live in tune with nature and with fellow animals who share with us this planet. An ecologist, before the term was coined. This sprang from his own native culture born of an indissoluble closeness to nature in their everyday life. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan. Lord Attenborough told us how he works. He can't go to the big American studios with his ideas. They would want to change the script. Demand more sex with touches of soft porn and gratuitous violence. Instead, he raises the money himself, makes the movie, and then has to sell it to the big distributors

on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The reality is that British movies have to be trimmed to suit the American market. Thus does British culture become enslaved by the mores of a foreign country. Our Prime Minister is regularly inclined to invoke the word patriotism in his rhetoric. I shudder when politicians use this word. Churchill once described it as ''the last refuge of scoundrels''. A nation's culture is fundamental to its identity. Destroy a nation's culture and the nation is rootless.

Integral to every genocidal war is the destruction of a people's culture. The genocidal onslaught by White European immigrants against North American Indians was among the foulest in the annals of human history. Yet the white settlers had the cheek to call them savages. In my childhood we were brainwashed by American movies to view Red Indians as Neanderthals who could and should be slaughtered.

I am sure Dickie's film helps correct this distortion of history. But I didn't see the movie. When the meal and the speeches were over I tried to stand up and found it excruciating. I went to hospital instead of the cinema. Part of me is now well and truly plastered. I'm hirpling about in crutches. All I need is Johnny Beattie's parrot on my shoulder and I would be a dead ringer for Long John Silver. But I've learned my lesson. If I had gone to this function attired as the slob I am, in my crumpled lounge suit, there is no way I would have been brought down by that ice. Does anybody want to buy a nearly new camyerbum with matching bow tie?

Now for something entirely different. Blair's speech in South Africa and talk of the Third Way. This term has been used in European politics over the past hundred years by neo or quasi-fascists. I am not suggesting that Blair is a neo-fascist, but he is the most right-wing leader the Labour Party has ever had. His messianic tone is disturbing. He tries to explain his concept and there's nothing there. No flesh. No bones. Only empty soundbites. He talks of the global economy as if he invented it. The real debate is not about whether there is a global economy but about who should control it and what ends should it serve. In the current issue of the Social Creditor there is an essay by David C Corten, a man who has worked for the United Nations Agency for International Development and served on the faculty of

Harvard University's Business School. He makes a devastating point. ''Five firms control more

than 40% of the global market in oil, personal computers, and - especially alarming in its

consequences for public debate on these very issues - media.'' Left to its own devices the

global market will eventually be controlled by

a relatively tiny bunch of men whose only

criterion for decision-making will be their continued personal enrichment. They will economically rule the world and make a mockery of all concepts of democracy. Their power can be challenged only by nations working in concert. This is now the single most compelling argument

in favour of the European Union. Blair's monetarism will not countenance such collective

intervention by the nations of Europe for the protection of the people of Europe. It doesn't make any kind of sense.