Winter sales and the Glasgow tragedy – mankind at its worst and best.

'TIS the season to be ratty. It happens every year when they close off the town centre to light the Xmas illuminations. Some lucky driver is the last to be let through before the barriers come down and some unlucky driver is the first to be directed around the diversion. The unlucky driver said something when the police officer turned her away. I am no lip-reader but it didn't look like "compliments of the season." More like "furkling ballcocks."

SADLY, 'tis also the season for horror in the warrens. I came across our first myxie rabbit of the year in the back garden. He was fully grown, squatting on the lawn with huge sightless eyes. The disease usually breaks out earlier in the season and I thought the rabbits might have escaped this time. Not a hope. An hour after encountering this infected rabbit, I saw another at a traffic island 40 miles away. Myxomatosis, mankind's heartless biological-warfare offensive against Flopsy. Mopsy and Cottontail, is back.

"A VERY Black Day for British Manners" is how one newspaper headlined the scenes at the Black Friday sales, yet another pointless American import. Crowds of avaricious lard-arses (or "bargain hunters" as we sometimes call them) were pushing, shoving, elbowing and thumping each other at stores across the land to get their sticky hands on yet more non-essential gizmos to be presented to their fat, ungrateful children. "It was like a pack of savages," commented one shopper in Newcastle upon Tyne. "I was ashamed to be English." A few hours later a police helicopter crashed on the roof of a bar in Glasgow. There was no panic, no me-first stampede. In the darkness, customers, some covered in dust and blood, formed a human chain to help each other find the way to safety. What a curious race we are. Some people fight like cats over a computer game. Others put their lives on the line to save total strangers.

THE Glasgow tragedy makes you wonder how the media would cover such an event a few years from now if Scotland voted for independence and Glasgow was just another European city. How long before we would be no more interested in a helicopter falling on a bar next to the Clyde than if it happened in a bar next to the Rhine, the Rhone or the Danube?

MEANWHILE, until the facts are disclosed, we can only hope that this police helicopter was doing something important, crime-busting and socially useful when it crashed. The bereaved could then take comfort from knowing that their loved ones somehow died for the greater good. However, judging from all those police-action documentaries, force helicopters seem to spend an a lot of time chasing teenage joyriders and petty thieves who, after a pursuit costing thousands of pounds, are rewarded with yet another caution or a community non-punishment.

THABO Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, says Tony Blair's government asked South Africa to help the UK invade Zimbabwe and depose Robert Mugabe. Blair insists that he "never asked anyone to plan or take part in any such military intervention." Maybe not. All I can add is that Blair's spin-doctor was certainly keen to invade Zimbabwe. I interviewed Alastair Campbell in March 2004. Growing irritated by my questions on Iraq, he tried to psychoanalyse me, explaining modestly: "I'm quite good at reading people." He proceeded to guess , wrongly, that I was the sort of person who had been against going to war in Iraq. I explained that in general I was in favour of deposing despots. "Zimbabwe?" he suggested eagerly. I nodded. "Excellent," declared Alastair Campbell. "I agree with that." I bet he and Tony had some fascinating discussions.

USEFUL seasonal definitions. For media purposes, during the coming month drunks will be divided into "revellers" and "thugs". They may look much the same but, in the event of a punch-up, the winner is invariably a thug and the loser is always a reveller.