SO, what are your annual heating bills? £528? Do I have any advance on £528? Let's try £107. And that's for a four-apartment house.

LISTEN up, because it's not every day you'll find me singing the praises of a Conservative government.

SO, the US senate hearings on the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi have been postponed. For "postponed" I imagine we may read "abandoned".

LIFE. But a life sentence isn't life, is it?

ONE comment on Twitter suggested that Raoul Moat had finally managed to get his own TV show. The News.

IT was rumoured that someone was a bit careless with the matches. A bit of whin burning, it was said, got out of hand. Who knows?

I GUESS most of us who are used to tootling around the highways and byways of the Highlands and Islands in the depth of winter know the golden rule. It's deeply unwise to brake hard on an icy road.

OK, it's getting beyond a joke now. Not that the death of 11 men and the leaking of 60,000 barrels of oil a day (or is it a hundred thousand?) into the Gulf of Mexico ever was a laughing matter, of course.

NEARLY 40 years on and the shock of the unprovoked violence is still as real as it was the first time I heard the dreadful news.

THE gift of music is a wonderful thing.

REGULAR readers of this column (I'm fondly assuming there are some) will know that I'm not a great fan of the expenses scandal.

ANY Hitchhikers Guide fans out there? Those of you who are will remember Arthur Dent's discovery that the entry for Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy consists, in its entirety, of the word "Harmless".

IN the raft of compromises made by the Tories or - more often - the Lib Dems, one in particular stands out.

IT'S the only story in town: the election. And not only the debacle - in a western "democracy" - of people being unable to exercise their democratic right due to Town Hall incompetence.

LIKE Lillian Ladele before him, Gary McFarlane has finally lost his religious discrimination case.

SO, what are you doing next Thursday?

AND so, as I prepare for the long flight back to the UK, my thoughts are turning once more towards what's happening at home.

AND so here were are, my youngest daughter and I, in Western Australia, leaving our poor men at home to fend for themselves. How were the flights? Long. Long, long, long.

OKAY - here's the deal. Imagine you have a senior position within a company.

MP'S expenses? You know, it doesn't faze me too much. Paid lobbying? Now that's a different matter. It is the work of the devil.

JACK Straw's got me worried. I usually reckon you're on the right side of any argument, provided you're on the opposite side from Jack Straw.

THE e-mail arrived in the other half's inbox out of the blue just before Christmas. "Are you a great-grandson of William Mann and Ann McIntosh?" it asked.

SO here's my confession; my dodgy past. As a child and a teenager I was a telly addict. I remember our first telly arriving. I guess I was about four or five.

YOU can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

SO often the persecuted become the persecutors.

THERE are choices to be made when I write this column. Even in today's electronic age there's still some turn-around time.

THE snow has all but melted away. There are still, as I write, some particularly persistent patches of ice left, but they're now few and far between.

WIND turbines? Graceful, elegant, pleasing to the eye. Well, to my eye at least. I love 'em.

ONCE relatively common, it is now considered a once-in-a-lifetime event. It is the Grand Match between north and south. It was last held at the Lake of Menteith in 1979.

WELL, we certainly had our white Christmas this year, didn't we?

IT'S Christmas! Actually 25th December is our second Christmas Day this year.

I GUESS we all know that awful feeling when embarrassment becomes excruciating and you just wish the ground would open up and swallow you. Go on, admit, it - you've been there too.

OF course, it was obvious at the time they were lying through their teeth. Nothing new there, then.

TODAY, as you read this (assuming that your copy of the Courier gets delivered on Friday before breakfast) I'll be making my way into Aberdeen city centre to collect my gown, hood and mortar board.

WHO'S feeling stupid now? Regular readers may well recall our wind turbine saga.

COMING our way: six months of contraflow and queues on the Kessock Bridge this coming summer. Bit of a contradiction in terms given that "summer" hereabouts lasts about three weeks in a good year.

IN its rush to get a new nuclear power programme established in the UK, the government has changed the planning laws in England.

WHAT price now independent scientific advice to governments? Professor David Nutt was the government's chief drugs adviser. He was appointed to tell the government what the scientific evidence tells us about drugs.

AT last - some good news. The Scottish Government looks set to announce that they're giving the go-ahead to the proposed power line from Beauly to Denny.

POOR old Nigel Farage. Poor old UKIP. Apparently the legal action the Electoral Commission has taken against the party could bankrupt them.

I CANNOT actually remember my Uncle Charlie. He died when I was only months old.

I'VE been resisting for quite a while now. I keep getting emails from friends asking me to join them. Now I've capitulated. I've signed up to Facebook. Sigh.

IT is not often that the arrest of a paedophile is greeted with outrage. But there has been huge outrage in some quarters at the detention, pending extradition to the USA, of top film director Roman Polanski.

IT is the tag given to Britain's most dangerous, hardened criminals. Category A prisoners are those "whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public, police or security of the State and for whom the aim must be to make escape impossible." They are held in high security prisons.

THE radioactive particles which have been appearing on beaches around Dounreay are minute. But some of them pack a potentially lethal punch.

AT 13 years old Laura Dekker is already a very experienced yachtswoman. She has been sailing seriously since she was six and sailing solo from the age of ten.

THE truth of the matter is this: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi probably played absolutely no part in the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie.

IN theory, cycling's great. In the days before First Scotrail made it so difficult for those of us living near unmanned stations to get Flexipass tickets, I used to cycle to and from the station.

IT'S a terrible thing when you're frightened to go home.

IF you don't like swearing, give this week's column a miss. I've asterisked out all the bad words as is traditional in these parts, but even so... Don't say you haven't been warned.

WELL, the renovations chez Mann are nearly complete.

OF all the wars one might consider "justified", Afghanistan is high on the list.

I HAVE spent a large part of my life assuming my phone is tapped. On the one occasion I picked up the phone to hear my previous call being played back to me that seemed a fair assumption to make.

TELL it to 'em straight. Send 'em a good strong message.

THIS week the doctor's union has been debating whether or not they (the doctors) should be allowed to suggest to patients that they might pray for them (the patients).

IT looks as if Belfast's Nazis have succeeded. Most of the Romanian families they've attacked over the past few weeks have decided they can't stand it. In fear of their lives, they want to go back to Romania. Well, wouldn't you?

IT has been a bit of a sentimental journey chez Mann these past few weeks. Guided by our daughters, what was the children's end of the house has been getting a complete makeover.

THERE is a harsh irony to the timing.

LISTEN... Can you hear it? Yes, it is a kind of splash/thump. What is it? Could it be the sound of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater?

CHRISTIANS cannot have it both ways. Either they believe God created us in his image, or they do not. Either they believe it is God's place to judge mankind in heaven or that it is theirs to judge us here on earth.

I AM a great fan of the much maligned Human Rights Act. I believe that everyone is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity. That, in my view, is what the Human Rights Act is all about.

POSSIBLY it was a sign of great tolerance. Possibly it was a sign of great stupidity.

SO UK plc is in a financial fix. A real fix. A deep, never-ending (at least, not for the next 20 years or so), hand-wringing, gut-wrenching fix.

THE subject of MPs' allowances is always going to raise the public's ire and prompt outraged headlines.

SO tell me. Are you the only person on the entire planet that does not know who Susan Boyle is? If you do not, you had better Google her real fast. The rest of the world already has.

I HAVE been to more than my fair share of demos over the years.

FUNNY how you can have no strong views about a person one day and consider them a complete plonker by the next.

FORTUNATELY, he is not a Muslim. Luckily, he does not speak with an Irish accent.

AT last. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has decided to start protecting... birds.

BOOZE — It's sacred, in England at least. Or so it would appear.

I KNOW, I know. I keep banging on about climate change and there's me (and himself, of course) taking our second set of long-haul flights this year. And it's only March. Even my most sympathetic reader may pause to think that's just a little excessive.

SO, what price common courtesy in today's society? Does anyone care about politeness any more?

SO it comes down to this: Binyam Mohamed almost certainly suffered prolonged, degrading and inhuman torture at the hands of the US government when American security forces abducted him from Pakistan, during "extraordinary rendition" to Morocco and during the four years he spent in American custody at Guantanamo Bay.

BANKERS! It's all their fault. Forget social workers, forget politicians. Bankers are the new pariahs.

CHOOSING what to write for this column each week makes you notice certain things. One is how often you get news stories that are related in some way.

THE first photo shows the beautiful, radiant bride looking graceful and elegant in front of a long, colourful line of 35 guys in kilts. In the next the bride is — mercifully — absent. The guys have turned round and, amongst flapping folds of tartan, are in the process of proudly displaying the rear view of what's worn underneath. Hmmmm... boys will be boys.

SPEED limit on the A9 north of Tore? Sixty at night, 40 (or maybe 35, or maybe even 30) during the day.

AFTER work every Tuesday that falls on a purl day of the month — fellow knitters will know what I mean — we're to be found sitting in the Eden Court's café. Fiona has made a little string of knitted pennants to announce our whereabouts to any new knitters who might happen by.

IT will be one of the most momentous occasions I can remember — depending how the next four years turn out we may look back on Tuesday's events as most momentous in our lifetimes.

FOOD is my downfall. I love it. I love the flavours, the aromas, the textures. If ever you think of inviting me round for dinner, bear in mind I eat just about anything. I don't like grapefruit or marmalade, so best if I don't hang around for breakfast — but that's about it.

WHAT a difference a year makes. This time last year we were, for the most part, looking forward with optimism.

I BLAME those blasted cop shows on the telly — really I do.

I REMEMBER a particularly nasty crossing from Eigg to the mainland.

FOR years I've not really understood why people get so exercised about the workshy.

SO, imagine you're a civil servant working close to the seat of power in a major government department. In the course of your work you come across something really worrying.

SPOT the difference: Paul Gadd, aka Gary Glitter, and David Brown, an Edinburgh-based evangelical Christian. Both are convicted paedophiles.

WHAT'S the difference between a dead child and a coconut? You don't know? Well, hey, you're in good company. Jersey's boys in blue can't tell the difference either.

IT is amazing how the political tide has turned and turned again. When Gordon Brown first took over from Tony Blair, Brown was lauded as a great success. His handling of various early crises was solid, measured and — most importantly of all — successful.

HOW dare Cardinal Keith O'Brien, official leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, compare the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to the atrocities carried out by the Nazis?

MONDAY witnessed the sad death of Incapacity Benefit, aged only 13, at least as far as new claimants are concerned though it lives on, for the time being at least, for existing claimants. Its parents, Invalidity Benefit and Sickness Benefit had both died when it was born.

THERE are times when you wonder — don't the police have better things to do?

ASSUMING we survive the crash — and I do not think we will be able to be assured of that for some time — it will be interesting and instructive to see what kind of political system rises from the flames.

THERE has been a flurry of energy announcements of late and it’s clear that the Scottish and English energy paths are starting to diverge.

THERE are some things that take your breath away.

WHO said the Large Hadron whatsit couldn't produce black holes big enough to do any damage? Well, HBOS has fallen into something and it sure looks like a big black hole to me.

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.