"I'm no worse than the Daily Mail."

I REFERRED a few days ago to the process of sorting out the rights to oil and gas before Scotland votes on independence. A reader suggests they are leaving it to the last minute and hoping for the best, in the belief that it'll be oil rights on the night.

AT LONG last, after days of provocation from the Daily Mail, Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman breaks cover and defends her role in the National Council for Civil Liberties which, in the 1970s, allowed the Paedophile Information Exchange to affiliate. On one level she has no need to apologise; PIE was admitted before she even joined. Even the Tory-leaning Spectator magazine is wary of the Mail's anti-Harman campaign, declaring: "No-one can see a connection between the past and the present; nothing prominent Labour figures did or said about child abuse at the old National Council for Civil Liberties influenced what Labour did or said in power or what Labour thinks today." And yet this comes dangerously close to accepting, as I pointed out some time ago that "back in the 1970s no-one took child abuse seriously." That is the honest truth but it is hard for any public figure to admit it without somehow diminishing the wickedness and making excuses for Jimmy Savile and his ilk.

I AM surprised that Harman chose to fight back by accusing the Mail of hypocrisy over its use of images of young women. Of all the excuses a Leftish politician can offer, is there anything weaker than: "I'm no worse than the Daily Mail"?

COMPUTERS have changed every aspect of our lives except education which carries on as it has for hundreds of years with one teacher addressing one class of pupils. My Teacher is an App (Radio 4) is enough to give anyone in education sleepless nights. A trip to Silicon Valley suggests kids can get their learning from personal computers, meaning schools can sack up to half their staff and still achieve better results. At a time when English college lecturers are striking for higher pay, technology is seriously reducing their market value. Still fancy a career in academia?

LAST week of February and I'm in shirtsleeves, working on the boat. Does climate change bring good weather, or only bad weather?

IT IS that time of year when my old lugger is well away from that treacherous, bouncy stuff called water and safely moored on its trailer, on the drive. Not enough is written about sailing on dry land but a casual tour of the housing estates of England, with their permanently parked boats, suggests it's far more popular than sailing on water.

I NEVER thought I'd get nostalgic for the 1980s but a rare showing at the weekend of the John Cleese comedy Clockwise (ITV3) took us back to 1986 and reminded us how much life has changed, sometimes for the worse, in little over a quarter-century. Back then we had some truly awful cars (remember the Austin 1100?) but glorious open roads. We had disgusting, vandalised phone boxes but everybody was much slimmer. I interviewed Cleese at the launch of Clockwise. All went well until I mentioned Monty Python's Life of Brian. "Ah, the cleverest thing we ever did," beamed Cleese. To the dismay of the PR people, we spent the rest of the interview chatting about Life of Brian, not Clockwise.

MIND you, Clockwise did produce one terrific quote. It comes as Cleese's character, the headmaster Brian Stimpson, realises all is not quite lost in his desperate attempt to reach a conference in Norwich. Slumped at the side of the road he tells his young travelling companion: "It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand." We all know that feeling.