Time to stop this sick haggis filth

This week I was forced to endure my worst meal yet north of the border.

Attending what could loosely be termed a dinner on Burns night, I discovered the natives had apparently scraped up some roadkill and put it on a platter. Then they started talking to it, like a shock- horror road safety campaign that had gone badly wrong.

Just when I was expecting Donald Dewar to stand up and lecture us on drink-driving - though it would look a bit rich now, I suppose - he got up and suddenly attacked the remains with a big knife, like a man possessed though apparently not of a sense of either taste or smell. I'm telling you, they ate the damn thing. It was Lord Of The Flies: The Tartan Sequel. I'm lucky to have survived. You know - in all those plane-crash-in-the-Himalayas movies they always eat the young, attractive ones first. More tender, I suppose.

TRAITOR All the way through the so-called meal, that education bloke Cubie kept hissing "traitor" under his breath - though frankly it was a welcome distraction from what was on our plates. I told him straight, they should stick those whingeing students on a rock somewhere and let them fight for survival - like we had to in my day. Sometimes we were down to our last Fortnum and Mason food parcel before help reached us in Halls.

Now that's the kind of deprivation those softy so-called castaways on Taransay should have been faced with, instead of running for four- star cover every time the communal jacuzzi packed up. Still, what can you expect from the Jeremies at the BBC. They're so full of politically correct claptrap they think the government should declare whole neighbourhoods Deprivation Zones if they're more than a mile from the Job Centre.

HELM They completely lack the understanding of the common man - and even commoner woman - that I have developed at the helm of a populist newspaper. Some days the air in my office is so thick with raw human emotion I can hardly see my Rolex.

If I had my way - and let's face it, survivalist fans, I usually do - I'd parachute the entire staff of Bush House onto that Godforsaken island and let them make interesting recipes out of each other. I reckon the religious education bods would go first, by popular demand - then those dreary documentary-makers who depress us at every opportunity (and great expense). Then whoever makes those annoying Polish animations. The public would love it. We could get Kirsty Wark to present medals at the end to give it a bit of intellectual appeal.

TOTTY Talking of totty, our new star writer has worked out even better than I thought. Her in-depth investigation into false nails has been a revelation. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I asked her to dig beneath the veneer of modern woman, and I confess I wasn't originally convinced you could get an interesting four-part series out of it.

But that's the very essence of female mystery - how they can be amused by such a load of old crap. Guess I'll never understand them really. Well, at least not the ones in the west end wine bars, which are all crammed with incomprehensible little minxes who can drink a decent man under the table and then leave him slumped in a shop doorway covered in his own vomit on the way home. Minus his wallet. Still, you've got to have a social life.

GAY Talking about public decency, this gay sex backlash is taking off like a rocket thanks to my firm moral stand. There soon won't be a window dresser left in the Central Belt and we will all sleep safe in our beds. Or in my case, in someone else's.

Our new reader offer - Burn a Poof and Win a Free Feng Shui Session, has had a fantastic takeup. And they have the gall to say New Man is a figment of the media's imagination!

More morsels from Jack's news smorgasbord next week

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