Another Scottish gripe about the BBC having too much English coverage and not enough Scottish. Plus the usual demand for an independent Scottish news at six. Let us hope such never comes to pass. Scottish broadcasting is already too parochial, amateurish and obsessed with football.

This has nothing to do with native talent: the BBC bristles with Scottish producers and presenters. It has to do with Caledonian couthiness, or at least notions of it.

This is all part of the Scottish whinge. The press is full of Scots at the highest level, as is the financial industry, manufacturing, the arts, the medical profession, the civil service, not to mention British politics.

Speaking of Scottish broadcasting, there's a chap on Radio Scotland in the mornings and at noon with the most irritating accent I can ever recollect hearing. It's from Orkney, I think, and it's awful. The fellow's pronunciation seems to bear but little relationship to normal English, even allowing for the strange enough spelling of the language.

There are a lot of accents I don't like: Belfast and Dublin. That of Liverpool and Birmingham, and south-east estuary. There is an especially annoying Edinburgh Academy accent, and a very nasty Netherlee one in Glasgow. Anyway, we should all have at least three accents: one for the house, one for the playground and one to get you the job.

What a wee angry week I seem to be having. Today's object of my ire is the news that paid paternity leave is to be increased. I am a single, unmarried, childless, self-employed man. I am already paying for people to have sex, have weans, pay for their education for years and for when couples separate and throw themselves on to state benefits at will. I pay for every folly thoughtless people can think up. Normally I do not demur at this circumstance, but when I am told to stump up for some New Man to bond with his brat at my expense, it has surely gone too far. Of course, every bachelor boy and girl is faced with this imposition.

Off to the Royal Glasgow Institute press preview. It is a wonderful show, this year held in the splendour of what was once the Mitchell Library reading room.

It is also a very young show, with very young artists displaying a wonder to us all. Helen Wilson wins two distinguished awards and rightly so with her Degas balletomaines.

The show of the little paintings was superb. But for me the stand-out was the magnificent full-length portrait of the girl in yellow by Norman Edgar. This is a piece of which Sargent would have approved and should be bought, and I do not exaggerate, for the nation right now. I came away from this exhibition, which stretches from Friday to Sunday, November 13, with stars in my eyes. Do not miss it.

Neither should you avoid the exhibition of the work of the part-time lecturers in the so-called fine art department of Glasgow School of Art. I have never in my not entirely short life seen anything purporting to be art of any kind which is as shallow, purposeless, jejune and pretentious as this collection of worthless drivel.

His attitude reminds me of the story of Sir Thomas Beecham touring with his orchestra in the deep south of America. Finding himself in need of a brandy and soda in some Kentucky town, he turned into a bar reserved for coloureds, as Afro-Americans were then titled, a "shine bar". He was told politely: "We don't serve whites in here, sah," to which his choleric reply was: "I'm not white. I'm pink." He got his B&S.

Here I must confess that I was guilty last week of bad faith: I like and admire Terry Wogan. It just sounded good at the time. But I was taken to task on this matter by my old chum, Alison Campbell, of that lovely little spot, Portobello. Alison has but recently published a book of poems which have been read out over the years on Tel's prog and it is now in your nearest Ottakar's. It is titled I Woke Up With Wogan and the poems contained are both sophisticated and a little girly, just as Alison, writing under the pseudonym Sally Forth, is herself. The price is three quid and the profits go to Children in Need. What I think children are in need of does not bear scrutiny.

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