And your point is, caller...?

Ed Miliband. I googled the name to make sure I spelled it right. You know, the one people think is called David. Not good at eating in public but working on it. Tried at the weekend to persuade us he has a sense of - gulp -"fun" and can take a joke.

There will be a UK election in May 2015 (I'm hoping by then it'll be a rUK election) and Ed is trying to come up with some good ideas. But not for him dumping Trident, shoring up the NHS, sorting out education in England (that shambles is going to be a real eye-opener now that Michael Gove has moved on), repairing the cash-strapped police service, sorting the housing shortage, fixing the railways, restoring sense to the social security budget, jailing the bankers, persuading the public that EU membership is a good idea.

No, Ed wants audience participation at Prime Minister's Questions in Westminster. So many things to ask. Who'll pick the questioners? Who'll be responsible for ensuring fairness in the spread of questioners in terms of sex, race, political interests? Will there be an algorithm that will weed out the BNP and EDL supporters? I know there's a democratic deficit in the UK but I can't see this getting the voters revved up. Not unless questioners have the right to shout 'You're fired!' any time the PM looks shifty and can then watch him take the walk of shame. I can definitely see it being just like Any Questions and Any Answers on Radio 4 (now a serious embarrassment) or one of those terrible BBC Scotland political discussions chaired by Jackie Bird, carefully set up so that no one is allowed near a microphone except PLU - people like us - all carefully vetted.

No, the only way to do this is to make everybody take a turn at asking the PM a question. There are 46 million of us on the electoral roll. There are about 145 days a year when Parliament meets. (Blogmeister: Are you sure that's all? Yes. I checked.) Let's say that means about 20 PMQs a year. If 100 people get to ask a question each time, I reckon it could take 23,000 years before we all get a turn. Seems fair. It would take me that long to come up with a question.

Picture the scene...

The PM throws down his newspaper. 'Bernard', he says. 'Get Sir Humphrey in here. I want to know how this happened!'

'This?' echoes Bernard.

'This!' the PM repeats, stabbing at his copy of the Telegraph. 'Sir Humphrey assured me these Games would be a fiasco. After all, on his advice we didn't finance them - we're still paying for the Olympics, for god's sake - will be till about 2062 by the look of things - we left it to the Scottish lot to meet the costs of these Commonwealth Games they're so keen on. And dammit, they've brought them in on time and on budget. What the hell?'

Sir Humphrey appears in the doorway of the PM's office. 'Yes, Prime Minister?' he asks.

'Who's responsible for this opening ceremony, eh? Probably some leftie Hollywood film maker with too big a budget.'

Sir Humphrey takes a deep breath: 'Not at all, Prime Minister. The director of the opening ceremony of the 2014 Games is a relative unknown. Given the small budget he had to work with - no helicopters, no Queen, no James Bond - he decided to use Glasgow people in all the main roles.'

The PM splutters: 'You're not serious! That bunch of welfare scroungers!'

'Volunteers, Prime Minister. As your Big Society people were meant to be...What happened to them, I wonder? Pretty talented, some of these volunteers. The two Glasgow police officers singing in George Square, for example...'

'Don't talk to me about police officers, Humphrey...too close to home. According to Bernard, two million Scottish people watched this Opening Ceremony and one - just one - London journalist - that idiot woman from the Guardian - has come out against it. The rest are falling over themselves to say how much they loved it, teacakes and all.'

'Prime Minister,' Sir Humphrey draws himself up to his full five foot eight, 'A few things to remember: No matter what happens, the Scots will refuse to believe their opening ceremony could have been any good. Secondly, they'll never win any medals anyway. And best of all, we'll be able use the opening ceremony to plant a few anti-Indy stories.'

The PM smiles: 'Now you're talking, Humphrey!'

'Yes, Prime Minister', says Sir Humphrey, 'Let's begin by suggesting the SNP tried to hijack the ceremony by getting the Red Arrows to change the colours of their smoke trails.'

The PM grins wolfishly: 'And did they?'

'No, of course not, Prime Minister, but I think Gordon Brown has already shown how much tosh we can get the Scottish public to swallow: he's already got them believing they will only get kidney transplants if they stick with the Union.'

O man o man - politicians take my breath away!

I decided a long time ago not to hate people. There's no benefits in hating: it makes your wrinkles worse, sends your blood pressure soaring and changes nothing. But o man o man, I hate the Tories. Rampant self-interest seems to be their favourite posture.

The trouble is, now I'm starting to hate the other party politicians too. And this has nothing to do with the forthcoming referendum.

When I saw Danny Alexander on TV last night (new haircut, contacts instead of glasses and evidence of media training) denouncing the bedroom tax, I shouted at the telly: What's wrong with you? We told it wouldn't work, that it would only penalise the poor and disabled  living in public housing who can't move because there's nowhere to move to. They'll get into arrears with their rent - and they'll get evicted. Why didn't you denounce it before you voted on it? Or were you just so glad to be in government, you would have gone along with anything the Tories suggested?

But the Lib Dems are no worse than the Labour Party. I was a member for 40 years on and off and I can't believe what I'm seeing. No policies that I can make out. No principles. Just a determination to copy the other lot and, if anything, be even tougher on the poor and disabled. Effectively removing all hope from the voters and giving them even more reason to stay at home on polling day.

I'm only glad my parents and grandparents aren't around to see this fiasco unfold, as the political parties collude in dismantling the Welfare State their generations worked so hard to create.

It isn't too late to change the right-wing direction government is taking, but it will take someone at the head of a party with imagination, charisma and intellectual force to turn things around. And I can't see the leaders of any of the parties above as anything other than nonentities.

Second post today - can't be good...

...and it isn't. When I got back from volunteering today, my neighbour was watching out for me, apparently to tell me the window cleaners had been but really to confide that she has had the results of her scan at the Beatson and her cancer (she calls it 'my' cancer) has spread.

She's 85. She told me when I moved here 6 months ago that she'd had cancer. I also know she is quite isolated. She has two sisters, one down south and one in Canada. Luckily, she also has a nephew who visits from Perth every week. And she has a very kind carer who comes in twice a week. The MacMillan nurse also comes regularly and will be back on Monday. (Mind you, come to think of it, she probably has more people in her house in a week than I do.)

She's had two lots of chemotherapy and has decided she wants no more, so this is the endgame. I don't know her very well but I had already sussed that she is quite needy and the chances are I'll see quite a lot of her from now on. (When I told her a while back I couldn't sit in the sun and would be in the shady back garden, she moved her seat from the front door to the back...)

I have no idea at all what to say to her. I make fatuous noises, saying idiotic stuff like: I hope you feel better soon, when I know she won't. The trouble is there's no handbook for dealing with death. And someone like me, who could never be mistaken for a member of a caring profession, really needs guidelines. What I want to ask her, the practical stuff - have you given someone power of attorney, have you made your will, are you an organ donor and if you are have you checked that's okay? - are all pretty inappropriate and my mouth is firmly shut on these subjects. I'm just not sure what are appropriate topics.

Don't imagine I have no experience of people dying. The volunteering I do is with very elderly people and people with serious disabilities. In three years, we've 'lost' four clients - at least two of whom we counted as good friends. Of our current clients, one has pretty bad COPD and one has had increasingly bad MS for 15 years. A third at 95 is just starting the downhill slide - we know the signs. I also had the experience of watching an elderly neighbour at my last house go downhill - broken wrist, broken coccyx, small heart attack, big heart attack - all pretty dramatic over a period of three years before she - perhaps mercifully - died. But experience doesn't make it easier. Part of having a 'good' death is surely having people around to help. And I'm no help at all as far as I can see.

Let's Hear It For The Games!

It seems 27,000 people have signed an online petition to stop Scottish athletes wearing this gear at the Commonwealth Games. I think the combination of red, brown and blue in a tartan is bad enough to require sunglasses but still I've decided if this is the only bad thing about the Games, I'll shut my eyes when the athletes march past next week.

If you're out and about in Glasgow at the moment, you'll notice a massive effort going in to the city's final spruce-up before the opening. Of course, you can argue that Glasgow should have been kept 'spruce' all along and not had to wait for a big event but hey, these are difficult times.

Streets have been swept for possibly the first time in decades. We have road markings - even on the southside, most of which isn't even going to see an athlete. We have hanging baskets and windae boaxes everywhere - on lamp posts and traffic barriers and along the Clyde - and guys watering them every day. Potholes that have got deeper and deeper since the bad winters of the late 1990s have been filled in. The air is full of the reek of fresh tarmac. Paintwork has been redone, including the front doors of Ibrox Stadium - and I've a feeling the Rangers board didn't cough up for that. We also have street signs reading: 'permit holders only' and 'extra car parking.' The parking is admittedly at a price (5 quid for the day), but this is Glasgow City Council's opportunity to make a bit of cash to supplement the council tax.

It all adds to the gaiety of the nation and I hope the competitors and visitors to Glasgow have a great time. Anybody got any idea what we can do in about ten years from now when we'll need another injection of cash to keep the city looking good?

I'll go no more a travelling

I know about airport security. I've stood in JFK for an hour when it was on 'lock-down' - nobody move, said the man on the tannoy, and that included pregnant women and the elderly with zimmers - and never yet found out what the hell was going on. I've stood in the rain on the tarmac at Kathmandu airport going through my fifth security check, wondering what the dozens of (dozy) soldiers were for if we needed that many checks. I've queued for hour upon hour at Heathrow security, listening to foreign visitors worrying that they were about to miss their flight home and watching lassies downing the contents of a half bottle of Bailey's in the queue because they'd been told they couldn't take it on to the plane. I've landed at Gatwick from Glasgow on my way to who knows where, been directed outside the security zone and then back inside the same security zone and obliged to go through the whole security rigmarole again for no good reason except airport incompetence. I've watched a fellow traveller in Atlanta Georgia turn pale and sweaty because he had just realised his personal stash of Mary-Jane was about to be discovered by the sniffer dog. I've taken my shoes off in enough places in the USA and wondered why they can't issue us with flip flops because those floors look manky. I've sat in a plane on the tarmac for several hours in - where was it? - Malta? - because a couple confessed to the cabin crew that they had bought lighters to take home to Northern Ireland as presents.

And I'm not doing it any more.

My pal Stuart says the day is coming when we'll only be allowed to travel by  plane if we go through airport security naked and with no luggage so we can be scanned and be shown to be no threat. With the new threat from ISIS, it looks like his prediction is about to come true. Most of your luggage now will be carried on by hand so you can put toothpaste, laptops and mobile phones - among other things - through the scanners.

I look back almost with nostalgia to earlier days of air travel when it was obvious what was banned - and why: 

List of unacceptable items	Lifetime prohibited items (cabin/checked in)
Firearms Knives Scissors (with blades more than 6 cm). Blades that are shorter than 6 cm are always acceptable. Ammunition - all ammunition must be unloaded from the gun and is not allowed to be fired. Hammers Crow bars	Fireworks and fire extinguishers Gunpowders and smoke flares Controlled drugs, and contraband drugs Vehicle airbags Liquid bleach Torch lighters Aerosols which might be more flammable (unless it is urgent) Hand grenades

...although I wonder why anyone would travel with vehicle airbags, crow bars and liquid bleach...

I've visited most of Europe, though sadly not Switzerland or Portugal; I've seen as much of north America as I need to see - Nashville and Memphis come to mind plus the vineyards north of San Francisco and I've enjoyed Quebec, Montreal and Toronto (although I was bored in Ottowa); I've seen the Caribbean; loved - loved - loved - Chile, especially Valparaiso and Patagonia; raved about places like Hong Kong and Singapore and saw what people love about India and Nepal. I've been amazed at South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland.  I've also had it confirmed for me that Japan is the most amazing place in the world. 

But that is it. From now on, if it's not in Scotland I'm probably not going to be visiting it. Nothing to do with patriotism or nationalism - I just canny be a**e* going through the cairryoan above.  

But good luck to the rest of you.