I'VE led a sheltered life.

HELLO... Hello... Is there anybody there...?

IT'S ironic that the one election which will make a real and significant difference to virtually every aspect of life in the UK is the one we don't have a vote in.

IT was the Thatcherite mantra of the 1980s and '90: you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. Sounds sensible, huh?

IT'S a lovely stretch of road, twisting through beech, birch and oak. In spring, dappled light glows on the tall, smooth trunks of beech trees and leaves are the softest, sweetest green. In autumn the woods are a riot of red and gold.

LET'S call them the pink country, the blue country and the yellow province.

BARRY George did not kill Jill Dando, and yet he spent eight years in prison. Why?

I WOULDN'T normally think road expansions — of any sort — are a particularly good idea.

BACK in the dim and distant mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Adam was a boy, I was a teacher.

WHY on earth would someone with "orthodox Christian beliefs" want to be a registrar?

IT'S July — and the Council is out cutting the verges on the A9. Or, rather, it's not. Someone is, but it won't be the council. It's probably contractors, but it all amounts to the same thing.

BACK in December last year, I said: "As I write, Ms Alexander is saying she will not resign. But she will. She is already a dead woman walking and she's more than intelligent enough to know it. By the time you read this, she may already have gone."

REMEMBER the first time you got a front-loading washing machine and you just watched the clothes going round and round? Or was that just me?

SIXTY-ONE thousand one hundred and eighty one pounds salary plus £133,899 expenses. That's how much David Davis cost last year. I do not really have a problem with that.

TORY MP and party chairman Caroline Spelman appears to be in deep trouble. Why? Because, 10 years ago, she used her MP's expenses to pay her nanny.

EVER since the recent Crewe and Nantwich by-election the pundits have been asking: is it the beginning of the end for New Labour?

PERSONAL carbon allowances; each one of us with our own tradeable allocation. It sounds like such a great idea, an elegant solution to the problems of global warming.

I GUESS my attitude to the armed forces is... well, confused.

WHEN people ask me about this column they constantly ask: how do you think of something to write about?

I HAVEN'T seen her for years, not since she was a child. But by all accounts she's an attractive, confident, intelligent and independent young woman. Her father is very proud of her. And with such a lovely vivacious daughter, who wouldn't be?

WELL, how did it go? Did you get through all the driving you had to do last week without a hitch?

OIL, oil, oil. These days it's oil more than money that makes the world go round.

The excitement must have been too much. Your poor humble columnist was laid up all last week with a particularly nasty cold/'flu virus.

HILARIOUS, absolutely hilarious. When Heathrow Airport's new Terminal Five opened for business there was, apparently, only one cloud on the horizon. Those pesky demonstrators.

I'M not a gambling Mann. It's never floated my boat. My parents didn't gamble either, apart from the annual ritual of a half-crown on whatever took our collective family fancy in the Grand National.

GO ON, admit it. You thought the Irish "troubles" were over, didn't you? After all, they've now got their own parliament. Former hard line republicans are sharing power with former hard line unionists.

WHAT crazy, harebrained scheme will they come up with next?

You'd have thought I was asking for his daughter's hand in marriage, not proposing to erect a small wind turbine in the field beside our house.

It's men (again). Not all men, of course — just a tiny minority. But the key linking factor in their horrific, violent crimes is gender.

I'VE never heard it and I never will. Reports from those who can hear it vary. Some say it's just really annoying — a high-pitched buzz that drives you up the wall. Others say the sound is actually painful. Some have described feeling as if their heads were about to explode.

WHEN did you last use a phone box? Knowing that I was going to be asking you that question this week I've been racking my brains to think when I last used a phone box.

TUESDAY 5th February was Fat Tuesday — Mardi Gras. And, if you've got the slightest interest in the way the world's going to go over the next few years, it was also Super Tuesday.

TALK about a death wish. The economy of the Western Isles is dying on its feet. Has been for years.

CHARITY. It begins at home. It's greater than Faith and Hope, triffic though both of them may be. And it's about helping the poor, innit?

NORWAY, Iceland, Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Austria, Republic of Ireland. What have they got in common?

KENNY Richey is, as I write, heading home to Edinburgh after 21 years spent on death row in Ohio for a "crime" he did not commit. It's been clear for years that there was no crime. There was simply a tragic accident in which a little girl, Cynthia Collins, died.

BILL Rowe was a nice guy by all accounts; an Australian farmer, quiet, hardworking, honest and just pushing 50. He died on Christmas Day, beaten to death in a vicious, senseless attack.

IT is 18 months since I last wrote about that consummate showman, the Man with the Tan, Tommy Sheridan.

SAY "Bali" and the words "Hell" and "handcart" spring unbidden to mind.

THERE is good news and bad news this week. What do you want first? The good?

A WEEK is, as Harold Wilson so accurately said, a long time in politics.

NUMPTY of the week award: should it go to Peter Watt or Gillian Gibbons?

I BELIEVE the expression is: dead in the water. I refer, of course, to the government's ill-starred Identity Card Scheme.

GO on, admit it, you thought the death penalty had been abolished, didn't you?

SO, IS Zoe's Ark, the French children's charity, a cover for paedophile child-traffickers, as some in Chad have suggested, or simply a bunch of well-meaning but deeply misguided do-gooders?

I CAN'T work out whether Alex Salmond's very clever, or whether Gordon Brown and David Cameron are both very stupid. It's a bit of both, I guess.

IT is ironic that, just when we're using every diplomatic card in our hand to try to steer the likes of Iran and North Korea away from developing and deploying nuclear weapons, our government is busily announcing bigger, better nuclear weapons systems of our own.

THE breaking news as I write this column is that Sir Menzies Campbell — leader of the Lib-Dems has quit, blaming Gordon Brown for calling off a snap election.

IT IS the only Tory policy that's got anyone excited in years. Scrap inheritance tax on estates valued at less than a million.

SCOTLAND, Scotland, Scotland: how could you let me down? In the middle of August our son and his girlfriend arrived from Australia for a six-week holiday.

THEY are amazing, vibrant images. Images that tell of the very foundations of a town's economy. Images that show ordinary working people in ordinary working lives, a fascinating glimpse of social history from a bygone age.

"ARE you off early?" Keith asked before pouring us all another glass of wine. "Nope," we said. "It's very civilised. The flight's not till 11.15."

I CANNOT begin to imagine how awful it must be for Kate and Gerry McCann. First there is the disappearance of their three-year-old daughter. Words just can't sum up the anguish the parents of a child who dies or disappears must feel.

IT IS not until you get out and about with your grandchild 21 years after you had your own babies that you realise just how much things have changed.

WE live in a country where violent crime runs as a sort of background noise. It's there, but we don't really take much notice of it until something in particular draws it to our attention.

MALAWI. It’s got AIDS, poverty, corruption, runaway population growth and pressure on agricultural land. And now it’s getting Jack McConnell too. Lordy, Lordy — how unlucky can one little African country get.

ACROSS Scotland the bunting's blowing in the breeze. Street parties have been swinging along all week.

HOW glad am I that we no longer have to go through that annual parental agony, the long, nail-biting wait for that brown envelope with the offspring's exam results dropping through the letterbox?

AYE, wee Eck's nae daft, is he? He's about to publish his much-trailed white paper on an independence referendum. It was an election pledge, so he is pretty well obliged to do it.

WE have seen flooding before — but never anything quite as extreme and excessive as the deluge that's affected large swathes of England over the past couple of weeks.

ARE you married? No? Ah well, tough luck. We’re now well into our 32nd year in that blissful institution.

BLOW up the balloons, unfurl the streamers, fly the flags. Yes, we are grandparents.

PRECONCEPTIONS? We all have them. Try this one: terrorists, who are they?

WE are now on the home run and the excitement is practically too much to bear. Our first grandchild is scheduled to put in an appearance in little more than a week.

THE extraordinary thing, in last week's violence in Palestine, is that only about 100 people, including some civilians were killed, fewer than the number killed most days in Iraq's bloody violence. But it is likely that many, many more will die over the next few months.

THERE are those who would fall in a slurry pit and come out smelling of roses. And then there's the other sort. The George Galloway sort.

BEN Needham. Vicky Hamilton. Madeleine McCann. That's only three and their cases span 16 years. They are the tip of a nightmarish iceberg.

HEY, thank goodness for devolution, our shield from some of the UK government's wackier ideas.

HEY, the new Scottish Parliament isn't a fortnight old yet and already we have the issue which may yet determine whether we continue with devolution or go for a full divorce from England.

LAST week I echoed Harold Wilson's sentiments about the extensive nature of a week when it comes to politics. Funny, that. For it seems a week is an even longer time in Highland politics.

AS Harold Wilson so succinctly put it, a week is a long time in politics.

SO – Prince Harry’s going to Iraq. It’s difficult to see how it could be otherwise.

HEY guys — I’m a winner!! At the moment I’m not quite sure what I’ve won. But what I can tell you is this...

IT'S widely accepted as the biggest single threat to mankind. Millions will die. Vast areas of our planet will become uninhabitable, through low-lying areas becoming flooded and through deserts expanding.

PEOPLE occasionally ask me: how do you decide what to write about in your column? Well, usually something's just happened.

TONY Blair is, for once, perfectly right. The arrest of 15 Royal Navy sailors and the subsequent parading of several of them on television was "cruel and callous"; "a disgrace" which only served to enhance people's sense of disgust with Iran".

THE Scottish Parliament is an established force in our country. I was one of those who campaigned for it. I was one of those celebrating its birth.

THERE are lots of ways to ruin your life should you wish.

IT represents horror beyond belief or understanding and betrays the most profound of immoralities at the core of our country and our country’s leaders.

WE will call her Debbie. She was 11 when I knew her. She would be over 40 now and I often wonder how she got on.

I DON’T know about you, but I’m confused (yeah, yeah, I know — isn’t the first time, probably won’t be the last).

WHEN is a consultation not a consultation? When it’s just a con — of course.

BY the time you read this, UKAEA, the operator of the notorious Dounreay Nuclear Establishment, will have been sentenced for illegally discharging radioactive waste to the environment.

LAST Friday morning dawned mild, bright and clear. The sun shone with that yellow brightness that seemed to turn the world to gold.

CHRIST was silent on homosexuality. Not one word on the subject, as far as we know, did He ever utter.

SHETLAND and the Western Isles: hey, what’s the difference you might wonder? They’re both island groups off mainland Scotland, though admittedly Shetland’s a lot further from the mainland than the Western Isles.

THIS past week has seen a momentous anniversary. It is exactly 300 years since Britain came into being though the 1707 Act of Union.

THEY are the most exciting pictures I have seen in many years.

SADDAM is dead. He was a vicious tyrant who maintained his power base by a combination of patronage, corruption and the murder of his political enemies. He ordered the mass destruction of entire villages complete with innocent inhabitants who happened to be from a rival ethnic group.

WELL, that’s about it, folks. It is amazing how the years roll round fast and faster each time. Just when we were getting used to 2006 — whoomph!!! — it is gone and we stand on the cusp of 2007.

I SHOULD not be doing this. I should be doing my Christmas cards instead.

IT’S poverty, stupid. Are the Tories deliberately contrary or just thick when they tell us that most of society’s ills are down to co-habitation?

WEAPONS of Mass Destruction — do you love ’em or hate ’em? D’you know — I don’t think it’s such a difficult question.

“I MEAN, who…” the radio presenter intoned, “…had ever heard of Polonium two-one-oh before last week?”

THERE are times you just want to bash peoples’ heads together, aren’t there?

ONE black, two white. One guilty, two innocent. incitement to racial hatred is a despicable, filthy crime regardless of where it comes from and irrespective of the race of those it seeks to whip up hatred against.

CHILD murder is always a dreadful thing. I may have written before about Elaine Anderson; a bubbly, talented, popular and academically gifted former school friend of mine. She, her brother and their grandmother were killed during a frenzied hatchet attack by Elaine's father.

SIR Nicholas Stern's name has been a gift to headline-writers from John O'Groats to Lands End. "Stern Warning" (The Times, The Guardian) "Stern Warning to Save the Planet" (The Herald). You get the picture. But does the government? And do we?

IT is difficult to look back on Iraq and remember the way things used to be. It wasn’t perfect, of course, and it wasn’t democracy. But Baghdad was a reasonably cosmopolitan, secular nation. Women had the right to education and to be able to work. If they didn’t want to cover their heads or faces, they didn’t have to.

HUNTERSTON, Hartlepool, Hinkley - as far as this week's nuclear stocks and shares are concerned, you might call them the H-bomb.

YOU don't go to see your MP for fun, you know. If your MP happens to be Jack Straw, I'm guessing you'd have to be pretty desperate to go at all.

ENGLAND and Wales - 143. Spain - 140. Scotland - 135. Yippee! At last; a European league table in which we Scots are in the top three.

CAT or dog? Cat. Red or white? Red. Bath or shower? Bath, bath, bath.

WE do a fair day's work. We get a fair day's pay. That's the deal.

YOU can get used to a stack of blueberry buttermilk pancakes for breakfast, really you can.

THIS year nature's bounty has been a bit - well - unrestrained. I haven't really known what to do with it all.

IN the new world order, Iran is arguably Britain and America's worst nightmare, making all our recent enemies look positively benign by comparison. Thought to be behind various terrorist groups and to be clandestinely arming Hezbollah who have recently been locked in mortal combat with America's best friend Israel, Iran is run by Islamic fundamentalists under Sharia law and seeks, many believe, to acquire nuclear weapons under the guise of a nice, friendly nuclear power programme.

YOU can knit on the tube, train or bus. But you can't knit on a plane.

GULP! The news of a foiled terrorist plot to blow up planes leaving British airports has caused more than a frisson of concern in the Mann household. You see, it's not too long till we fly to the States to celebrate a friend's 50th birthday. Gulp!

CALL me sad, but I have to confess: I've been transfixed. I've listened goggle-eyed to every twist and turn in the lurid stories The News of the World and its columnist, Anvar Khan, invented about the socialist man-with-a-tan, Tommy Sheridan.

THE slaughter of innocents. There is no other way to describe it and there can never be any excuse for it.

LOOKING at the photo close up, you can see the sheer, raw delight on the boys' faces. They're bursting with excitement in the way only very small children can be.

IT is like an endless nightmare replaying itself over and over again.

THIS week I asked for - and got - special dispensation.

WE didn't used to have a telly. In fact we didn't have one until quite recently.

IT'S strange how, sometimes, events just come together in a way that appears as if the pieces of a jigsaw have dropped into place.