Alan Taylor's Diary

ACCORDING to reports, an Edinburgh plumber has resurrected his bid to take control of Hearts, a football club, from Vladimir Romanov, a banker. This has raised eyebrows in some quarters where plumbers are still seen as being one step up from binmen. How naive!

Speaking from bitter personal experience, it is not hard to understand how even the humblest plumber can find a spare GBP50 million. I myself have probably contributed a fair whack of it. Whether spending it on Hearts is a sane thing to do is, of course, another matter.

All this tipple tattle . . . for a cool GBP1 million

LIKE all right-thinking folk, I was horrified to read last week in this throbbing organ about the continued persecution by the polis of Thomas a Sheridan and his sumptuous wife, Gail. Mrs Sheridan, we learned, acted "like an IRA terrorist", by reserving the right to remain silent before she was charged with perjury and the theft of a few tipples of whisky, as she had every right to do.

I note that in order to prepare for the forthcoming case, Mr Tommy has cut back on his appearances as a comedian. There is, it would appear, some justice left in the world. Meanwhile, I see that another dear comrade, Giorgio Galloway, Fidelma Castro's biographer, has given the embattled couple his support.

"In a country where killers, rapists and muggers are not exactly thin on the ground, " burbles Giorgio, "even Tommy's worst enemies must be wondering about the cost - GBP1 million and counting - in police time and resources being put into this squalid 'miniature' little case." The case is expected to be heard later this year, hopefully - given the huge demand for seats - at Hamden.

That's definitely a dressing down

MY dear friend Chris Harvie, Gnat EmSPee, has received pelters from tubes, many of them feral tabloid beasts, for having the courage to say, first, that Lockerbie is a "dump" and a "Tescotown" and, secondly, that the youth of Teuchterville wear the ugliest clothes in Europe.

This, alas, is what happens when one speaks the truth these days. I have never visited Lockerbie and do not intend to but I have been in many towns like it and the word "dump" does not do justice to their awfulness.

You may recall when my dear chum Sir Jocular McConnell called several towns pigsties, including Wishaw and Motherwell. You might have thought such candour would win him a second term as First Meenister. How wrong can you be!

Such was the opprobrium heaped on Sir Jocular that he went out of his way to deny ever having said such things. I note, too, that Mr Harvie has had to backtrack in order to placate the fuming citizens of Lockerbie.

His remarks about what the youth of today are wearing, which he has also recanted, apparently so incensed Davis Mundell, a Dodo EmPee, that he alerted the press. Quite why Mr Mundell, a numpty, should be so upset, beats me.

I have it on good authority that he, like most members of his silly party, thinks that a shellsuit is what oysters wear.

Scratch 'em and it's your funeral

TO Italia, where there are still a few real men left, behaving as if auditioning for bit-parts in spaghetti westerns. But for how much longer?

In Como, near Milano, a court has told a 42-year-old workman he must stop scratching his you-know-whats in public and has fined him euros-200. His lawyer protested it was a "compulsive, involuntary movement, probably to adjust his overalls", but the insensitive beak was unmoved.

It would now appear "genital patting", as it's known, has had its day. It is believed the judgment will have far-reaching implications, particularly among more superstitious men, who, as hearses pass, grab their attributi in order to ward off bad luck. Apparently crossing one's fingers or touching wood does not have the same effect. The beak told the workman the next time a hearse passes he must wait until he gets home before allowing his "hands to stray trouserward". God knows how that reads in Italiano.

Grass is greener on the other side

SO farewell Bertie Smalls, Britain's first supergrass. Mr Smalls, who has died aged 72, was a career criminal whose speciality was firing bullets into the ceilings of banks, thus scaring the living daylights out of tellers.

Another first he claimed was the use of a sawn-off shotgun. While he helped rob banks, his wife and kids waited outside in the car, in which he drove away afterwards as if he were a dutiful husband and father, which, of course, he wisnae.

In 1972, after a GBP138,000 raid on a Barclays bank, Mr Smalls was arrested in his underpants - at home, one assumes - in a dawn raid. Whether this moved him to clype on his former colleagues I cannot say. But, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, he agreed to spill beans, peas and lentils.

Consequently, umpteen hoodlums were sent down, but not before regaling Mr Smalls with a chorus of Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again. Mr Smalls refused plastic surgery and the offer of a move to Australia, where everyone has a criminal past. Contrary to the cliches regurgitated by the thriller writers, he and his family did not go into hiding and eventually he began to frequent his old haunts, where no one said boo to his goose. He died of natural causes. That disnae happen in novels or on the telly either.