IN FEBRUARY, spending an Inverness weekend on the eve of an operation, I attracted comment for a gurgle of giggles. Immersed in a pile of books, and try as I might, every so often came a wheeze. Or a snort. Or a strange squealing noise, or a shoulder-shaking whuffle. Finally, with tears in my eyes, overwhelmed by mirth, I had to retire to my room.

I had bought some old Broons annuals, from the sixties and seventies, for a few fivers; some of these tales stand among the funniest things I have ever read. The Broons, of course, are a Scottish institution. The vast family live in a tenement flat at 10 Glebe Street in an archetypal Scots city, and their comic-strip has featured in the Dundee-based Sunday Post since 1936.

They were conceived by Dudley D Watkins, a comic genius - he also invented such characters as Oor Wullie and Desperate Dan - and an interesting fellow. He was not himself Scots, but

English; and he was also an avowed Christian, attached, I think, to the Brethren. He wrote comic-strip tracts - the ''Tony and Tina'' series, for World Evangelical Crusade: not many people know this.

Watkins had a perfect grasp of Scots wit and, in draughtsmanship, of Scots physiognomy. (He had one odd limitation: he was quite unable to draw a convincing cat.) His Broons exemplified the respectable working-class values of their day. They are not, of course, a realistic Scots family. It is doubtful if such a family ever existed anywhere. But they were the kind of family Scots like to think of as the template of our city-dwellers. You can love them and laugh at them.

Watkins died in 1969. For some years his work was recycled; then other artists were recruited. The strip's standard plummeted, for wit and draughtsmanship, reaching its nadir about 1982. In recent years the Broons have been drawn by Ken H Harrison. His offering for the 2000 Broons annual deserves analysis.

I bought this in September, and had it for all of five minutes before donating it to some friendly children. Subsequently, I heard dark comment from their mother - hitherto a firm fan - but it was only last week, in this paper, I read of wider consternation at the annual's contents. Forth I went and bought the book again, and read it with something akin to horror.

Drink, and more drink. In one story the men of the house lie to the women and escape to the pub. In another everyone, save Maw and the Bairn, gets drunk at New Year and can only cure the hangovers by hitting the whisky again. Paw and Granpaw emerge as aficionados of old malts. In one story - ''michty!'' - we are blackly affronted to find that Grandpaw has stolen Paw's ''Old Ardbeg'' and substituted it with cold tea. I am no teetotaller: but this is wrong. It is not merely that there is drinking, in a comic strip aimed, in the first instance, at children. Harrison portrays the Broons getting drunk in front of their children.

Women's groups have - rightly - expressed anger at one distasteful story about Paw's birthday. Paw is depressed. Nothing cheers him up. Finally the family haul him to a bar, where he is hailed by a kissogram; who turns out - in subtle ho-ho twist - to be his daughter, Maggie. My description does not do it justice. There is a lewdness in the drawing that renders the story evil. Maggie is drawn, scantily dressed, in an image that is explicitly

erotic and demeaning.

There are repeated sexual references. Lipstick on a collar sustains one story. In another Joe and Hen are caught filming young women in a paddling pool. Even Grandpaw (whose military experience has shifted from the Boers to Burma) now has a girlfriend; someone akin to Nora Batty.

Worst is the tale whose last frame shows the Bairn staring at Maggie and her boyfriend growing gracious in a dark corner of the lounge. ''Ugh, Maw!'' lisps the child, ''put a bucket of water ower them!'' The reference, of course, is to mating dogs.

The book is sexist in another sense: almost all the stories whose plots turn on humiliation show the humiliation of men. Hen and Joe, in particular, but Paw as well. In only one of Harrison's 97 offerings are women taught anything. There is another feature: utter lack of respect for elders. The children taunt their father and grandfather in tones of astonishing insolence.

Frankly, there are no children in these tales. The younger Broons function as miniature adults - knowing, sly, cheeky, without innocence or vulnerability. They lie and cheat and get away with it; in one story, the bairns swindle Grandpaw out of a fiver.

There are odd technical details. Unlike Watkins, Harrison is too fond of precise contemporary detail: a reference to the Twins' ''Texas CDs'' will be dated in a decade, incomprehensible in three. Much of the speech clunks, in dire efforts to add plot detail. ''Jings! Look who it is! Our cousin Richard Broon, frae Cowdenbeath!'' He cannot make up his mind whether to say ''to'' or ''tae''. There are understandable cultural changes: the Broons sons, for example, no longer sleep in one enormous bed. There are no ''straight'' stories, which Watkins liked sometimes to do, when a tale ends not in hilarity but in heart-warming affection.

What is eerie is the sense of parallel universe. It is like the scenes in Capra's It's A Wonderful Life, where the James Stewart character is allowed to see his small town as it would be had he never been born. We see the same people, but altered, different, his friend divorced and bitter; his

mother a sour, tough boarding-house lady; the girl from school a prostitute; his wife a pinched old maid. So it is with Harrison's Broons. There is a sourness to Daphne (who, weirdly, is now a balding lump.) Hen seems more gormless. There is a hardness - indeed, a palpable ugliness - in Maw's features. This is not 10 Glebe Street, and these are not our Broons.

This matters. You might say it is only a comic strip, or that the Broons must have a contemporary edge, but it matters. It matters because life is short and we are all on that remorseless conveyor-belt to eternity, and we are all real people in real

places in real time making real choices, and we should make honourable choices, and we should strive for decency.

Decency is not a fashionable concept, and hard to define beyond derision. But decent people are authentic, honest, kind, tolerant, and humble. They are courteous. They are also respectful. They respect age, learning, confidence. They give

honour when honour is due. They respect a man's territory and a man's declared wishes. They know how to seem. They do not giggle at funerals, swear on the street, get drunk in front of children, dress like folk 20 years their junior, make promises

they do not keep, dispute the turns of Providence or argue with their God. This is an ideal. It is an ideal of which I fall short; but it is an ideal to which I aspire.

What has become of the Broons is a spitting on that decency and an affront to standards still

widely cherished in Scotland. There is no love in this artwork, no regard for characters nor appreciation of universal human frailty. There is but mockery, innuendo, and booze. Laugh? I never did.