Mark Smith

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer secretary of state for defence. Grant Shapps was out in Florida earlier this year for the test firing of a Trident missile. The aim was for the missile to fly several thousand miles and land in the Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa. It did not go well.

The first time apprentice Beth Atkinson tried to break the bottle of whisky against the hull, it failed to smash which is considered a very bad omen among the superstition-prone people who work at sea. But then the Glen Rosa slid into the water at Port Glasgow and it was hard not to feel inspired and a bit hopeful. Ship meets sea; man-made meets God-made; beautiful.

I should’ve seen it coming. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been working on a piece for The Herald, speaking to leading figures in architecture and heritage about the buildings in Glasgow that are at risk of disappearing. One of the names on the list was the India warehouse on Bridge Street and what do you know: part of it has just collapsed and it will now apparently have to be demolished. Rubble and dust and bulldozers and another one disappears. Wake up Glasgow!

April 1st. Day one of the Scottish Government’s new hate crime law. Would I like to go to a secret gig in Edinburgh arranged by comedians and activists opposed to the legislation? Yeah, why not, should be a laugh. Provided I can contain my barely suppressed inner hate of course.

There’s a friend of mine who for years had an old newspaper bill pinned to his wall that he nicked from outside a newsagent on the morning of Friday May 2nd 1997. “Tories wiped out in Scotland” it said in big black inky letters and my friend had much to say about how delighted he felt that day. Lots of people did.

Let me tell you about a stone. Not that one, we’ll talk about it in a while. Another one, on the edge of Clatteringshaws Loch in Galloway. I was visiting the area with an English friend of mine recently and what happened probably reveals quite a bit about me, and maybe lots of other Scots too.

You think you know Glasgow, then you discover something new, like the fact there’s a tunnel from the City Chambers to the cenotaph on George Square. It’s about 3ft high, it’s so narrow you can’t turn round in it, and it leads to an 8ft-square underground chamber. No one knows who put the tunnel there or why. It’s a bit of a mystery.

It’s hard to know how we got here, but let me have a go. Five years ago, Nicola Sturgeon led Scotland’s largest ever Pride event. “Choose love” said her T-shirt in vivid LGBT+ rainbow colours. And around her: rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. This week: Holyrood bans rainbow lanyards. What happened?

The thing about a typical politician’s speech is most of it doesn’t count. About 60% of it is fluff and cliché, about 35% of it is repetition or repeats, about 4% is made up of slogans and buzzwords and 1% of it is new, if you’re lucky. Humza Yousaf uttered 3,500 words in his speech at the weekend, but only 100 of them really mattered, so let’s talk about that.

Hello boys and girls, I thought we might do today’s column in the style of Police Scotland’s “Hate Monster” campaign. Perhaps we could talk about all those naughty-waughty people who don’t know how to control their hate, mainly horrible white men from deprived backgrounds. What’s that, Sooty? You think the public should be treated like adults? Ok then.