Tony Blair was in Scotland on Friday expounding on the mythical Scottish financial black hole which will devour us all if Scotland becomes Independent

He was using figures compiled by former Enterprise Minister Wendy Alexander. The one who is in denial about Scotland being broken? Yup. Same one.

The lady doesn't understand numbers.

The truth of the matter is that nobody knows what the Scottish budget is. Sure the Executive publish data each year but the numbers aren't reliable.

The information is compiled from various sources and for half a dozen of these sources very large assumptions have to be made. For example nobody knows what the Scottish income is since nobody bothers to collect the regional source of British income tax. Sure the money piles up in the Treasury Department in London but none of Gordon's minions know where it comes from.

To get over this embarassing omission, samples are taken to get a rough estimate. They look at a couple of thousand income tax returns and extrapolate from there to get a national average. At best, this will have an accuracy of plus or minus 20%.

When you are dealing with half a dozen sources with the same sort of inaccuracy, its no very long before you have no idea what you are talking about.

Nobody knows what the Scottish budget is.

To suggest that Independence will cost each of us £5242 is absurd. It shows a total lack of understanding of the concept of mathematical precision.

What can I say? Wendy is the Convenor of the Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament and is on the Education Committee. I must have been at the Uni with her dad who was a pal of Donald Dewar. A University degree was worth something in our day.

So, our former Enterprise Minister doesn't understand numbers.

This didn't stop her giving the numbers to Tony. He used them in Edinburgh and Aberdeen on Friday to try to put the wind up us.

This is the same Tony that thinks Sadaam had weapons of mass destruction. The same Tony who thinks that the situation in Iraq has nothing to do with unease within the Muslim communities in this country.

The man will believe anything George (or Wendy) tells him.

The SNP had their Spring Conference in Glasgow this weekend.

Alex Salmond used the occasion to announce a £500,000 donation from Brian Souter. This puts the SNP campaign war chest at £1.75 million.

The Scottish Jacobite war chest, well no so much a war chest as a wee poke, is £100 and dwindling.

How does this create a dilemma?

Do you want to elect a party to government that thinks the only solution to problems is to throw money at it? A party that doesn't think ideas are important? A party that specifically forbids its members to have ideas?

Or do you want to go with the lot who are rich in ideas even if they barely have a couple of bob between them?

At the moment, its Brian Souter's money they are squandering. Elect them in May and it will be yours.

Vote Scottish Jacobite!

The UK is switching from analog TV signal to digital by regions starting with the Borders Region in 2008.

Folks with newer TV sets can use an inexpensive set top box to handle the digital signal.

A lot of older folks, pensioners such as myself will have to get a new TV. This will mean a visit to Curry's.

The Curry's sales staff are very good at taking your money including the extra dough for the extended warranty.

As part of their efficient service, they will even deliver your new TV. If you buy one of these fancy flat screen digital things, Curry's will hang it on the wall for you at a small additional charge.

Their charges are £19.99 for delivery; £59.99 for delivery and installation. Installation involves taking the bits out of the box and connecting things up. For £199.99 they will deliver the set, install it and hang it on the wall.

Crunch the numbers and you find they are charging £140 to hang the flat screen TV on the wall.

Two men can drill the ten holes in the wall and hang the TV in ten minutes. Lets call it fifteen minutes to give a bit of leeway.

Two blokes at £140 for fifteen minutes works out at £280 each per hour. Or £11,200 per week (40 hours). Or £582,400 per year.

For hanging a TV set on a wall. ...no worries, Curry's. They are laughing all of the way to the bank.

I wanted a new Community Centre but what I got instead was Superdrug.

Last week, Superdrug opened its new store in the former Coop premises on West Princes Street.

Last February (2006) I suggested that the vacant space would be ideal for a new concept in Community Centres.

Helensburgh hasn't had a Community Centre since years of neglect caught up with Argyll and Bute Council and they were forced to close the Clyde Street School Centre on health and safety grounds.

The Coop had just moved out of the shops on West Princes Street and whitewashed the windows to save on the Council bills.

If the Council had done some imaginative thinking they could have done a deal with the Coop and we could have moved in by March 2006.

How dare I use the words Council and imagination in the same sentence. The Council did nothing. The opportunity was lost, and we have a new Superdrug.

I know that we are a bit geriatric in Helensburgh, but do we really need a Superdrug? We already have four chemists including Boots on Sinclair Street and a Semi-Chem across the street from them.

We still need a Community Centre and that space would have been ideal. Right on the main foot traffic pattern in town; just right for exhibitions of local interest such as the recent Helensburgh Conservation Area Group do in the Victoria Hall; large glass frontage so that people could see what was going on and be attracted inside to find out more; in the middle of town so that folks attending events would be able to visit the shops in a oner; why the Helensburgh and Lomond Council could have had their meetings there and brought a whole new meaning to transparency in local government.

A waste of space.

The City of Portland, Oregon has a population of 550,000. It is governed by a Mayor and four Commissioners. The Mayor assigns the various City Bureaus to the individual Commissioners. Bureaus such as Fire, Police, Parks etc. That way if you have a problem you know exactly where to go for help. If the people at the front desk won't help you, you head for the Commissioners Office. If all else fails, you use your vote in the next election.

Helensburgh doesn't have a governing body. There is an offshoot of the Argyll and Bute Council called The Helensburgh and Lomond Area Committee which masquarades as the representatives of the town. There are ten councillors on the HLAC for a Helensburgh population of 14,500.

If you compare the two situations, you come up with some interesting numbers. Applying Helensburgh's ratio of 10 councillors per 14,500 population means that Portland should have 380 Commissioners. This is twice the size of the Holyrood Parliament and a sure fire recipe for total gridlock. Which is about what we have on the Helensburgh and Lomond Area Committee.

Apply the Portland ratio of 5 elected representatives per 550,000 population and you come to the conclusion that Helensburgh should be able to function with 0.13 Full Time Equivalent. Or one person working one day a week.

Sounds about right. Maybe something would get done then.

The Helensburgh Partnership was set up as a joint venture of Argyll and Bute Council and Scottish Enterprise West Dunbarton. It is funded to the tune of £600,000 of your money to see what might be done about the town.

Turns out, it was all a bit of a mistake. The right hand didn't know what the left was doing.

The big idea was to use the pier car park as the carrot to get a developer on board. The developer gets a sweetheart deal on the land, the town gets something happening at last and everybody is happy.

To go back a wee bit in the story, you will remember the ill-fated scheme for a Supermarket on the pier front. A joint venture brought to you by Argyll and Bute Council and Luss Estates. The ground had been gifted to the town by Sir James Colquhoun. There were some questions raised at the time about who actually held the title to the land. We were told that this was "Commercially Sensitive" information and we didn't need to know.

But, we did need to know. Ownership of the land is the subject of an ongoing law suit between the Argyll and Bute Council and Luss Estates. Sir Ivor is hard up these days and will take it to Brussels if necessary, so it will be a while before it is sorted.

Do you think any developer in their right mind is going to want to touch that lot with a very long barge pole?

£600,000 of your money down the tubes.

I got an e-mail from my mate Jimmy this morning. We shared digs when we were at the Uni.

He is a physicist and worked in LA in the aerospace biz. He and the wife and Mitch, the pussy cat, are heading to the Seattle area to retire and stopped off in Sun Valley, Idaho for a winter's skiing along the way.

It seems that there has been debate raging in the pages of the New York Times about the genetic origin of Scots. Its a continuation of the argument that our Celtic, Viking and Norman genes are so mixed up over time that we are all related and therefore should stay in the Union.

One writer from the Bronx pointed out that for the English to claim ethnic identity with the Scots was the worst kind of social climbing!

It is interesting to do some calculations and find out just who we might be related to.

We all have two parents, four grand parents, eight great grand parents etc etc.

We don't know much about our great grand parents, probably never met them, so don't think about them. However they were there. And the generation before that and the one before that.

If you take the average generation time as 25 years, there will be four generations in a hundred years and each of us is descended from 16 people who were alive 100 years ago.

Go back 200 years and we are all descended from 256 people who were alive in 1807. The numbers are starting to get bigger and bigger.

What happens if we go back further in time?

We are all descended from 16,777,216 individuals who were alive in 1407.

Its a startling number.

We have a conundrum. We are apparently related to more folk than lived in Scotland at the time. The number of 16,777,216 is a genetic necessity but some of these people were related, in other words they will appear in the calculations more than once. So that the actual number will be less than the 17 million. Technically, this is inbreeding but in a reasonable sized population, this is nothing to worry about.

The point is that we are a' Jock Tamson's weans. If there is such a thing as Scotch genes, we have them. We have been good at exporting them too.

If you know the whereabouts of any of these people you are asked to contact your local police station.

You don't recognise any of them? Maybe the names will help.

David Martin
Ian Hudghton
Struan Stevenson
Catherine Stihler
Elspeth Attwooll
Alyn Smith
John Purvis

Still not a glimmer?

The Magnificent Seven are Scotland's MEPs. These are the folks responsible for fighting Scotland's case in Brussels.

They have made heroic efforts in defending our fishing industry; worked tirelessly in saving the NHS from the cumbersome contraints of EU Regulations; made sure that our shipyards are in a fair fight with Polish yards in the competitive bidding game.

And most of us have no idea who they are. An invisible presence.

Which about sums up Scotland's current role in the EU.

An Independent Scotland. Out of the EU.