I’ve never met Dame Ann Gloag but I’m often on one of her Stagecoach buses although as Scotland’s richest woman I doubt she is. She’s just had planning permission to build 30 wooden cabins and also a glamping field on her estate outside Beauly. Apparently glamping is camping for softies.

Her house is Beaufort Castle, which she bought together with the surrounding acres in 1994. It was sold to meet inheritance tax owed by Lord Lovat, head of the Fraser clan. My grandfather was a Fraser so I take an interest.

The Fraser chiefs were neither fortunate nor blessed with financial acumen.The clan motto is I Am Ready, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Simon, then head of the clan, was basically incompetent, hence the fire sale to pay for death duties. The other beneficiary from the death was the impresario Cameron Mackintosh who scooped up another few thousand acres.

It fell to Kim Fraser, the younger brother, to try to maintain what was left. He died recently but an obituary in The Times details how he became clan chief. “Then in 1994 he (Simon) died of a heart attack while out hunting, only a week after the death of brother Andrew who was gored by a buffalo in Africa.”

Not a fortunate family, the Frasers.

Gene theory

I PROBABLY have Neanderthal DNA in my genome thingie, which probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those that know me. Many of us do. These hairy brutes became extinct about 40,000 years ago after they inbred with the dominant Homo sapiens.

The Neanderthal genes apparently give us better protection from the cold, which probably explains all those young lads striding about in T-shirts when it’s snowing and taps off when the temperature is barely above tepid.

But the conception that Neanderthals were thuggish seems to be wide of the mark. New research has shown that those today with the genes have a significantly lower pain threshold, although obviously that doesn’t apply to me. Perhaps we need a historical revision? That the Neanderthals lost out to Homo Sapiens because they were snivelling wimps.

Turn it down

I GOT tired of comparing the market and switching energy suppliers so I signed up to one of those operations which do it for you and provide you with the cheapest deal automatically. I’m sure the site gets commission and the founders will, no doubt, in future be knighted or given a former public utility or quango to run, but could they do a worse job?

Last week, I was told I had a new supplier, a Scottish one. The People’s Energy Company which, apart from being the best deal for me, returns 75% of profits to customers (like me), provides electricity from entirely renewable sources, and is based just outside Edinburgh. The company was originally crowdfunded in 2017 for just under half a million pounds.

I won’t be running up the red flag just yet. We used to have people’s energy companies which we owned, before the madness of privatisation which made a few very wealthy, atomised supply into hundreds of providers and bumped up bills. But these comrades seem like a decent alternative, as long as they keep the lights on.

Take one …

Quote of the week from Dundee’s Brian Cox about Boris Johnson’s jaunt to Scotland. “If anybody listens to that idiot they need their head looking at quite frankly, if they can’t see what a total d***head he is.”

Bang goes the knighthood, Brian.

… and two

One from the past, in the week that the Tories in the UK Parliament voted down proposed legislation which would have “protected” the NHS after Brexit. In 2016, former Prime Minister John Major said Michael Gove wanted to privatise it, Boris Johnson wanted to charge for its services, and Iain Duncan Smith wanted to replace it with private insurance. “The NHS is about as safe with them as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python,” Major said.

Sea change

Headline of the week from The Guardian: Roman amphoras discovered in frozen seafood shop. But shouldn’t it be amphorae? Apparently they’re jugs, not some kind of crustacean.

A fine mess

We need to talk about the BBC. And the licence fee. If you don’t pay it then it’s a criminal offence and, according to the latest figures, 121,000 people – more than 70% women, and almost all in England – are convicted each year. Technically you can’t go to jail for it but if you don’t pay the fine, which can be up to £1,000, you do. If you pay, you still have a criminal record. One in 10 cases before magistrates in England is over licence evasion.

These bald facts came home to me when I watched two programmes on the Beeb during the week – one utterly compelling, brilliant, informative and heartbreaking, the second a PR puff, stretched over an hour and costing upwards of £500,000 of our money about a posh hotel in the Highlands. They seem to symptomise the total confusion, or schizophrenia, about the BBC’s role. Is it a public service broadcaster, or a ratings-driven organisation without ad breaks?

Once Upon A Time In Iraq is a five-part history – I’d call it condemnation – of the invasion, principally by US and UK forces, and the catastrophic aftermath. It’s on BBC Two, the channel the corporation puts shows on it hasn’t the guts to put on BBC One. I’ve worked for the BBC, and in the Gulf War. I’ve been in Iraq many times. I know people there, and I lost people I know there. So that’s my interest declared.

The films tell, in the words and memories of people involved, exactly what went wrong and why. It is brilliant, landmark TV, which will win awards. It was made by KEO Films, one of whose owners is the TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, whom I’d always considered a posh, nice bloke and not much more. Turns out there is a lot more. Many of us, indeed millions of us, knew exactly what would happen in Iraq and we said so. In the run-up to hostilities I was in Baghdad when the “dodgy dossier” was published in the British Parliament, allegedly naming the sites of chemical weapons’ production, and going to them with British journalists and TV crews and finding nothing because there was nothing to find.

Nonetheless the war proceeded. And newspapers, like The Times, The Telegraph and even The Guardian, whose journalists have been with me and saw nothing, went ahead and cheered on the dogs of war. Watch. If it doesn’t move you then your heart is a dried prune.

Then there’s Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby, for those of us who can only press our noses against the glass and watch the rich in The Torridon, the country’s most northerly five-star gaff.

I don’t know how much the publicity was worth to the hotel from this slavish, frivolous, unquestioning 60-minute promo which we paid for and which put a few noughts on the bank balances of presenters Giles Coren and Monica Galetti, but it will have been substantial.

If the licence fee is to continue then no-one should be criminalised for not paying. There also has to be a re-evaluation about what role the BBC should be playing in a new digital world.