ACCORDING TO scientists, some of whom may be nutty, we must do five simple things a day to stay sane. One of the boffins is John Beddington, Westminster's Chief Scientist, who says we need to keep adding to our mental capital, which he likens to a bank account of the mind. Hmmm. Among the things you can do to improve your intellectual account is mend a bike or learn to play a musical instrument. By coincidence, I note that Lidl, which always seems to anticipate trends, is selling drum kits, guitars, digital keyboard, trumpets and alto saxophones, for £199.99. If this promotes sanity, I'm Eric Clapton.

Dave can't pedal his political wares
TO glorious Glenrothes where Posh Dave insisted the Dodos have a chance in the forthcoming by-election - of finishing third. I suggest he renews the search for his missing marbles.

Of late Mr Dave has looked rather rattled, because his chum, George Osborne, the shadowy chancellor, has been a prat, in an instant undoing all the good work of the last couple of years. The idea was to present the Dodos as normal human beings. This is what's called attempting to fool all of the people all of the time. Instead of thinking they were rich, spoilt brats we were supposed to believe that because Mr Dave wears a cagoule he's just like you and me and not a former member of the Bollocks Club, an Oxford drinking club of dubious moral fibre.

Mr Ozzy's antics, hobnobbing with a Russian zillionaire, from whom he may or may not have hoped to solicit a gift for the Dodos, have undone all that.

In Glenrothes, Mr Dave was asked if he was inclined to debag Mr Ozzy if it was discovered he'd been telling porkies, to which he replied: "If my mother had wheels she'd be a bicycle." I jest not. All one can suppose is that Posh Dave is a) going nuts or b) has been reading the great Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman in which the theory goes that men - women, too, no doubt - are more or less bicycles. As one character says of another: "He had no back wheel on him and I did not think he had a front wheel either."

This could be Posh Dave speaking. Which would be fine were he a character in a novel, but from a man who aspires to be our next PM?

Sea sick over the floating palace' saga
AS I write, no criminal wrongdoing has been found, apropos Giorgio Ozzbourne and the Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, aka Mr Aluminium. Be that as it may, Mr Aluminium has watched his personal wealth plummet by £10 billion in recent months due to the financial hoo-ha and is said to be having difficulty raising funds to tide him over due to the spotlight being shone upon him by the feral beasts of the British meeja. What can one say, except: "I share your pain, Oleg."

One welcome consequence of "yachtgate" was the emergence from the deep freeze of my dear chum, Michael Heseltine, aka Tarzan. Mr Tarzan turned up on Radio Four's PM programme where he was lightly grilled by Eddie Mair, the honey-tongued Dundonian.

Tasked - ghastly word! - with defending Mr Ozzy, Mr Weaseltine chuntered: "What George does on holiday is up to him. If he wants to go on board a yacht and play deck tennis he is perfectly entitled to. And anyway, I've seen a photo of this yacht and it's really not that ..."

Not that what, Mr Weaseltine? Big? Bonny? Beautiful? Much to write home about?

For Mr Weaseltine's information, Mr Aluminium's yacht is over 70 metres long and has six decks. It has a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, sauna and gym. It can house 16 passengers and has 16 crew. It cost £80 million and has been described a "floating palace". But what it is not, as every salt knows, is a yacht. For that, you need a mast and sails.

The dangers of political prophesy
MEANWHILE back to Glenrothes, when my old amigo Kenny Farquharson hosted a hustings between the by-election candidates. Mr Kenny's current employer is Mayday! Mayday! (aka Scotland on Sunday), a comic. However, he was asked to officiate in Glenrothes by the local paper, the Glenrothes Gazette.

At the end Mr Kenny said he has no idea who will win the election and confessed that he has given up forecasting. Many in the audience were mystified by such a rare display of humility from a hack and wondered what had brought it to pass.

Allow me to explain. In July, Mr Kenny devoted his column in M!M! to the Glasgow East by-election and its consequences for Irn Broon. "How inconsiderate of them," it began. "It seems the voters of Glasgow East are stubbornly refusing to play the part sketched out for them in the story of Gordon Brown's downfall. According to the script ... the people of the East End were meant to rise up and throw off the Labour shackles, inflicting a historic by-election defeat ... such a sensational result now looks unlikely. Labour will indeed see its majority slashed in its 25th safest Westminster seat on Thursday. But few are now expecting Glasgow East to be lost to the SNP. The expectation ... is that Labour will win."

There was more - much more! - including a comparison to Irn Broon as "an old sick dog" which no-one has the heart to put out of its misery. Little wonder, then, that Mr Kenny is resigning from the prediction game. It promises, though, to be a glorious exit. Barring a late entry, he is the hot favourite to lift this year's coveted Tartan Bollocks prize, which is awarded to a political hack for a piece which - ahem! - proved to be total bollocks.

Rehabilitation ... on the 19th hole
ANENT - handy Scots word - the story last weekend in this throbbing organ about public officials eager to leap aboard the gravy train, you will not be surprised to learn that there were many more examples which we did not have space to print.

One such concerned my own local council, East Lothian, whose reputation for allegedly taking freebies and supping with those eager to do business with them is legendary. In May 2006, for example, Dell, who make computers, invited one of East Lothian's IT staff to a day's golfing plus dinner at the St Andrews Bay Hotel. Acceptance swiftly followed, accompanied by an email which read: "As you know, East Lothian Council have not had much luck when it comes to Dell servers, the Team Leader of Server Management is a keen golfer and an invite to this event my sic help rehabilitate his relationship with Dell."

Subsequently, the council's contact at Dell added the official's name to the guest list and emailed back: "Bring on the rehabilitation." Spookily, someone has blacked out the names of the officials. Not, one suspects, to protect the innocent.

Poetic justice in literary silence
MUCH bunkum is talked about Embra as a World City of Literature, mainly by folk who think that literature and junk mail are synonymous. Of late, I have been reading Stanley Roger Green's A Clamjamfray of Poets, the first book to describe the capital when it truly was a literary city and abounded with characters such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch, Tom Scott and, of course, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig, habituees all of the so-called poets' pubs situated in and around Rose Street.

Mr Green, who is younger than his subjects, all of whom are now deid, was nevertheless familiar with them and witnessed their antics at close quarters. Once, he recalls, he spent a chaste night in bed with Stella Cartwright, muse to several of those mentioned above, and for a while shared a flat with Mr Scott in which a young student blew his brains out. Heady days indeed!

One among many of Mr Green's anecdotes intrigues me. It involves Mr MacCaig and my much missed friend Sorley MacLean who were taking part in a reading. Mr MacLean went first and began to inspect a sheaf of papers.

"How long this might have continued is idle guesswork," says Mr Green, "but Norman's patience was not inexhaustible. His dry voice was quiet but had carrying power when he made the remark, I was told Sorley was to read his poems. I didn't know he was only going to read them to himself.'"

Mr Green places this event at the University of Edinburgh's theatre in George Square. I, however, swear I witnessed something very similar in a hotel in Paisley at a literary weekend organised by my dear friend, Jim Kelman. Am I mistaken or is Mr Green? Or was it a common occurrence? Or did it never happen and we are both deluded nincompoops?