Why are tax exiles, who have deliberately chosen not to contribute to our society, awarded with honours and titles? Lewis Hamilton, a nice young man who makes a huge amount of money from driving fast cars and keeps it all, is just the latest to bag a bauble.

Then there’s Sean Connery, a totemic figure in the last Scottish referendum, feted by Alex Salmond and the SNP leadership, who loved independence so much he settled in the Bahamas where there is no income, capital gains, wealth, inheritance, succession, or gift tax. According to his widow his ashes are going to be scattered on a Scottish golf course. They should go in the bunker.

Years ago the climber Hamish MacInnes told me what he said had happened when he was the safety boss on a Connery film called Five Days One Summer, set on a climbing holiday in the Swiss Alps. Hamish ran off with the female star of the picture, Betsy Brantley, and they lived together for years in Glencoe, although when he told me the tale they had long since parted and she was married, but separated, from director Steven Soderbergh.

There is a dance sequence in the film and Connery, take after take, couldn’t get the steps right. Brantley was an accomplished dancer and at some point she laughed at Connery’s futile attempts, and he hit her, allegedly.

Not with any great hope, I set out to try to stand this story up and somehow I got Soderbergh and asked him to convey a message to her to call me. Several weeks later, when I had forgotten about it, she did call me and confirmed it. However, Connery was still so powerful in the business, she went on, that she didn’t want to be named publicly but would provide an affidavit if he denied it.

Connery did not deny it. Several years ago, I met his son Jason who was then in rep at Perth Theatre. Jason spent more time as an adult in Scotland than his dad did. He also paid taxes.

Gone to the dogs

BEWARE not ticking the box on your online grocery order which says “no substitutions”. It can turn out expensive and embarrassing. I ordered four croissants ‘cos I’m that kind of chap

and eight turned up, two 80p packets of orange juice and received two £2 ones, four bottles of cherry wine when I wanted WKD Blue for my daughter, and 12 cans of dog food. I have a cat.

Thinking I’d be good neighbour I took the dog food to the next door neighbour who has a small one. This produced tears, and not of gratitude. How was I to know the dog had been put down over Christmas?

Tofu or not tofu

INTERESTING fact. Producing a kilo of tofu, which is a processed food, creates 25 times more greenhouse gases than a kilo of beef and takes 75 times the land to grow the soybeans. It also tastes like wallpaper paste. Avoid.

Team hit the heights

SLIGHTLY bizarre fact. With Hibs signing 6ft 7in goalkeeper Matt Macey from Arsenal, if he combined with the other two keepers in the squad (6ft 6in and 6ft 4in) they could whisper in the ear of a giraffe or look down on a double-decker bus. If they avoided injury.

Paradise truly lost

I SWITCHED on the TV on Thursday for a BBC programme called Death In Paradise, which I thought was about Celtic blowing 10 in a row. No, it’s really about how charming but stupid the native population of a Caribbean island is and how it needs an English detective to sort out the murders which pop up every week. The place is more dangerous than downtown Detroit.

There are a lot of white faces on this island – it’s actually the French-governed island of Guadeloupe, so why they should parachute in a Brit beats me? – and they drink tea and pass crumpets like they would have done in the 1950s in an Agatha Christie novel. And then there’s the guy from Rising Damp who has fled Rigsby and gone from being son of an African prince to top cop on the island. Mystifying.

Apparently about eight million people a week tune in to this expensive-to-make, risible mince and it’s now in its tenth series. It will probably go on in perpetuity, as will the attitudes it perpetuates.

Fortunately, I missed the show before, which was about finding the country’s top dog primper. It was called Pooch Perfect and went on for an hour. No wonder Netflix prospers.

Good news for atheists

OVER the last year or so, when I’ve been staying in hotels, I’ve noticed that there are never any Gideon bibles any more. Not that I’m religious, but obviously I always scour the cabinets and shelves to see it there’s anything free I can purloin. How else would I have got the dressing gown collection? A couple of decades back every hotel room in every part of the UK had one in a drawer. As Paul McCartney sang, “Rocky Racoon checked into his room/only to find Gideon’s bible”.

I didn’t know anything about the Gideons – apart from the fact that they were evangelical Protestants – until last year when the British branch split from the parent organisation in Nashville in an unseemly legal fight over women.

Gideons believe in every word of the bible – it’s the “infallible, inerrant word of God” – from the seven-day creation, the two by two into the ark, the loaves and fishes, the whole enchilada, including that “a woman should learn in quietness and full submission” and that God does “not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent”.

Gideons International is therefore exclusively for businessmen and professional men over 21. Women aren’t admitted although they did set up a sect for the spurned, the International Auxiliary, which probably involves a lot of sandwich-making and silently cleaning up after their superiors.

The British branch is a charity, for the tax advantages of course. But in stepped the Charity Commission, querying why women couldn’t join, pointing out that they were in breach of the Equalities Act.

Faced with being debarred as a charity, Gideons UK decided to ignore God’s disapproval and let lassies join. Which mightily enraged the women-fearing guys in Tennessee. Expensive garments were rent, I can tell you.

The Brits wanted to hold onto the Gideon name and trademark. Oh no, said the Yanks – and sued. Talk about not turning the other cheek, motes and beams, stone casting and Pharisees – there were teams of them in Savile Row and Brooks Brothers suits on either side of the Pond, firing off legal letters and writs while the warring Gideons were probably praying for bolts of lightning to disable the other side.

In December, a UK court ruled in favour of men so, rather than lose charitable status, the UK branch conceded, decided not to cast out women and agreed to change their name.

They are now Good News for Everyone. Well, not quite!