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stoatirs, the first of which was angst.

Angst is a cracker for a column. You can admit anything through the

very confessional of angst. You can even admit (though it is ill

advised) to be bereft of sexual experience. You can tell the readers

that you once experienced gentian violet ointment. You can explain how

your childhood went wrong because you were chased by big boys in the

playground. Angst lets you do anything. You can even complain about

other journalists getting things wrong.

Jings, what a surprise that is, journalists getting things wrong. As

someone who is quite capable of blithely informing the public that Croy

is in Lanarkshire, I confess to getting things wrong from time to time

myself. As the public get most things wrong most of the time anyway, I

should not have thought my errors of particular importance. Just about

the worst thing which a journalist can get wrong, though, is getting

interviewed by other ones. I should know. I was once interviewed myself.

Well, lots of times really.

The fact that I am personally a rather cheery chap with ideas not

worth being listened to by primary schoolchildren (primary

schoolchildren are used to that: after all, they get talked to by

primary schoolteachers), and with an occasional line in maudlin

self-pity, means that every time I am interviewed by another fat hack

like myself I think up a goodly dose of angst to make me merr

intellectual like.

A journalist once claimed that I had done badly at school when in

fact, to my shame, I had done rather well. Doing well at school didn't

go with the angst.

The same chap -- a chum, I may add -- claimed that I had boasted that

women liked me. I hadn't boasted that. I'd merely claimed it as a fact.

By the time Mr Roy had finished with his article I was a wee,

overdressed, drunken womaniser with enough braggadocio to have seen off

Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Prince Seithnehen. What Roy didn't say was

that I am a shockin' boaster in the literary stakes. But did I mind?

Spot the Bum

No. It was rare fun and good for my business. Angst was good for

business back in my art school days too. Just when the object of your

desire was being dreadfully scornful about you because she perceived you

as a drunken oaf, and in fact probably the one who hid the camera in the

girls' lavatories at Edinburgh College of Art and ran a photo

competition for Spot the Bum (it was me and Ally MacLean, in fact; now

it can be, well, revealed), at that point, as a drunken oaf, you strike.

A soulful look worthy of Marcello Mastroianni and a suggestion that

you had the sort of fatal disease that only Strindberg could think up

and you were away.

Don't tell me I was out of order. The girls at Edinburgh College of

Art were nothing if not spirited and did a lot better at the angst than

ever I managed. In those days even Juliette Greco looked healthier and

happier than art students. Occasionally you were dragged back to your

paramour's parental homes where you discovered that, far from being the

wild and intense siren who had weaned herself on Iron In The Soul, the

lassie had been a sensible lassie with blonde plaits and puppy fat, had

been a prefect at Laurel Bank, and whose reading material had been

mainly confined to Five Go To Kirren Island. The parents with sense knew

it was just a phase.

Five years after art college the girls were sensible again and plump

too. Angst was no longer such a grand idea. And anyway they'd married

and got up the stick and were worried in case their daughters would

misbehave as they did 15 years on.

Angst is for young folk to behave in a silly way. Angst in the older

chaps and chapettes is just sad. Sad it is too that older chaps express

their melancholy in desires for the old ways. Especially when they get

the old ways wrong. And here we have the other subject for the column

which I dredged up, casting back over the 400 years of my columns as I

done this week and that but.

Sir Andrew Gilchrist, a distinguished and welcome correspondent of

mine and yourself, claimed that whisky never got cheaper. His gas was

put in a peep by another letterer who pointed out that the water of life

has never been cheaper, which is in fact true. When I was a boy a pint

of heavy or light was cheaper than a dram. This is no longer the case,

as I know every time I buy a beer drinker a pint of expensive, fizzy,

coloured water. The small goldie down the throat is without doubt cheap

enough for even the most miserable mendicant to purchase upon occasion

whereas the ubiquitous bottle of Bavarian Pils would cost enough to pay

the redundancy money for angst-ridden journalists fed up with being got

at.

Our most recent correspondent said that a salary of sixteen grand

could purchase 30 bottles of the amber fluid a week. It led me to

reflect. One reflection is that I must be earning more than 16,000

spondulicks. The other is that I haven't experienced angst since I

started slipping a wee goldie or two down my throat. I think other

journalists should take note.