THREE HUMONGOUS cheers for AL Kennedy, the first stand-up comedian to win the Saltire Book of the Year award. Ms Kennedy's novel, Day, won her £5,000, a cheque for which was presented at an elastic ceremony in Edinburgh on Friday.

That, one trusts, compensated for her absence from the shortlist for the coveted Bad Sex Award, which featured two of my dearest friends, Christopher Rush, potentially Fife Ness's greatest living writer, and Ali Smith, the only Booker shortlistee to turn up to the award ceremony in her gym shoes.

Mr Rush's bad sex nomination came from a passage in his latest novel Will (as in Shakespeare) who, as he follies with Anne Hathaway, cries: "O glorious pubes! The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise."

I could quote more - much more - but there's a limit to what one can cope with over a plate of kedgeree.

If there were any justice in the world, however, the palm would surely have gone to Ms Smith, for the following stream of consciousness passage from Girl Meets Boy: "I was a snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple moves, stoke stake snake, then I was a tree whose branches were all budded knots, and what were those felty buds, were they antlers? were antlers really growing out of both of us? was my whole front furring over? and were we the same pelt? were our hands black shining hoofs? were we kicking? were we bitten?"

Again, one could go on, but time is pressing and space finite. And so, moving swiftly on, we come to the winner of this year's Bad Sex Award: Norman Mailer, whose passing we mourned only the other day.

The judges crassly suggested that had Mr Norm lived a wee while longer he would have accepted the award in the spirit with which it is given: a rebuke for iffy writing. I'm not so sure.

Mr Norm's posthumous prize was won for a passage from The Castle in the Forest, whose leading character, Adolf Hitler, was believed only to have just the one you-know-what.

Be that as it may, common decency prevents me from quoting Mr Norm's peerless prose. Instead, I will allow Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, sponsor of the Bad Sex Award, to sum up: "It was the excrement that tipped the balance. That, and the line about Alois being ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'. That was pretty awful."

Only blogheads believe own spin CAN a week really have gone by since we revealed that Gavin Yates, the latest appointee to the most difficult job in the universe - spin doctor to Sister Wendy Alexander - had used his personal blog to badmouth his new boss and a few other Laybore luminaries?

Mr Yates tried to remove the blog, but we were too quick for him. Thus, presented with a fait accompli, he protested that the blog was not an expression of his own beliefs. He had, he insisted, merely been writing as a journalist.

If Sister Wendy is inclined to believe such tosh, she is a bigger tumshie than I took her for. At the moment, though, Mr Yates seems destined to take up his post. And Laybore wonders why everyone thinks it ought now to be renamed the Numpty Party.

The law is far from uniform PUPILS at a school in Englandshire have voted with their feet and demanded school uniforms. In their experience, the wearing of a uniform makes them work harder.

Of this, the scientific evidence is as yet unforthcoming. What a uniform does do, though, is make adults think that the person in it behaves better than the person who does not wear one.

The idiocy of this point of view was horribly apparent at Glasgow Sheriff Court on Tuesday, where four former pupils of the city's prestigious Hutchesons' Grammar School pled guilty to assault and causing a breach of the peace.

The charges were brought after a particularly vicious incident when the drunken louts at the £8,000-a-year school attempted to gatecrash a party, intimidating guests, abusing young girls and striking a 14-year-old boy over the head with a bottle.

One of the accused was carrying a chain. Two of them attacked, kicked and punched the owner of the house in which the party was being held. Subsequently several of the victims were taken to hospital and others still suffer from the trauma.

However, the sheriff - Craig Henderson - saw fit not to jail any of the guilty oiks. Instead, they were each given 200 hours community service.

Here, then, in a nutshell, is the real value of a public school education and uniform. You pay your dosh and you get off near as dammit scot-free.

Cool Cameron, tepid Holyrood THESE be excruciating times for Irn Broon, who is so far behind Posh Dave in the opinion polls that he may soon lose sight of him.

Quite how this happened is a mystery. One moment Mr Broon was in the driving seat, the next he was locked in the boot screaming: "I'm a control freak, let me oot o' here!"

Every day, it seems, brings him another heidache invariably involving folk one has never heard of. Usually, though, when they're male, they - David Abrahams, Peter Watt, Jon Mendelson, anyone who works for Sister Wendy - look like the kind of blokes from whom you wouldn't buy a second-hand Hillman Imp.

Downing Street optimists say a week in politics is an eternity, and with a general election at least two years hence Mr Broon has plenty of time to redeem the situation.

I'm not so sure. The latest indicator is that fashionable, modern women, who used to be drawn to his Heathcliffian looks, now quiver like jelly at the thought of Dave. I'm talking about the likes of Kirsty Allsopp, Madonna, Kate Moss and Girls Aloud, who are actually five women.

One can argue until the cows come home over the validity of polls. Fashion is altogether different. When 21st-century politicians are no longer seen as cool or au courant they're toast. Posh Dave, my female advisers tell me, is the currently the coolest of the cool. That is inescapable. Cool, however, does not apply north of the Border.

My dear friend Alexei Salmonella, for example, is about as cool as Songs of Praise, but manages nevertheless to overcome that handicap. And then there is Dave's aunty, Annabel Goldie. You can be sure that anyone who thinks she's cool has too many Cliff Richard records.