MONDAY

AS readers of this always throbbing organ are doubtless aware, I never knowingly upset anyone. Michty me - the very thought makes me feel queasy!

However, I do reserve the right to be offensive should I care to and I rejoice when others, such as French magazine Charlie Hebdo make it their raison d'être.

Of course, cartoonists are much more likely to offend than writers, partly because that's the way they are and partly because people see their cartoons and immediately think they've been immortalised as a tube.

My dear amigo, Ralph Steadman, for instance, has made a career of dispensing offence. Nixon, Reagan, Heath, Wilson, Thatcher, Major - he pig-stuck them all.

I have a drawing he did of Nixon in which that odious fellow has a face like a warthog and out of his rear end is coming - well, let's not go there.

Eventually, however, Mr Steadman stopped drawing politicians because they were always wanting to buy his originals, to be hung like trophies in the very smallest room in the house.

His inspired response was to draw their knees.

TUESDAY

IN their infinite wisdom, the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have dumped a number of "countryside words", including "bramble", "clover" and "willow", replacing them with "up-to-date" terms, such as "broadband", "allergic" and "euro".

Though all of this happened in 2007, a number of authors, who are invariably a bit slow on the uptake, have only now decided that this is a heinous crime about which something urgently must be done.

Thus an open letter has been written by the likes of Sir Andrew Motion, Michael Morpurgo and Margaret Atwood. They're worried that country matters are being pushed aside to make space for geeks and gizmos. I agree but I won't be adding my clout to theirs until they join the mass movement, otherwise known as the Anent Preservation Society, which is to words what the Muslim Brotherhood is to hieroglyphics.

WEDNESDAY

I have visited several newsagents in the hope of buying a copy of Charlie Hebdo. None had it. One said he hoped to get it, another looked blankly at me when I inquired. He prefers to stock obscene publications such the Muckshifters' Gazette and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: The Journal Of The Crematorium Society.

Meanwhile, my dear friend Shaun has had made a batch of badges with the legend "Je suis Charlie".

I gave mine to the Home Secretary who, on arrival at Staggs, which is an exclusive watering-hole, promptly gifted it to another dear friend, Charlie Sim.

Doubtless he, like me, gave cheer when he saw the front page of last weekend's Sunday Post, on which there was a tearful Oor Wullie with "Je suis Charlie" inscribed on his dungarees.

The accompanying headline read: "Oor Charlie, Your Charlie, A' Body's Charlie." C'est magnifique!

I'M confused. Jim Moiphy, Laybore's northern branch manager, says he is not a Unionist. I don't suppose this is the same Mr Moiphy who for 100 days in the run-up to the referendum disturbed the peace of our high streets by jumping the queue at Greggs and telling all and sundry that we are Better Together?

Mr Moiphy, it would appear, is undergoing something of an identity crisis. As he desperately tries to avert catastrophe at the May General Election, he seems prepared to do more U-turns than a pretzel.

The guid folk of Scotia will not be fooled. They know he is a charlatan posing as a chameleon. Or vice-versa.

Now he has enlisted as gofer one John McTernan, who not long ago was communications director for Australian Pee-Em, Julia Gillard.

Down Under, Mr McT's use of unparliamentary language is the stuff of legend.

When Ms Gillard's staff were ordered to clear up their desks in what was designated a "War on Crap", it was pointed out that this was rather rich given that Mr McTernan's own desk was an environmental hazard. He responded with the sophistication for which he is renowned: "C***, you will be c**ted too."

Out of what holes in the ground do such louts crawl?

THERE is an oil crisis - and I am not referring to the extra-virgin stuff on which the smooth running of the globe depends. Having said which, my Tuscan correspondent informs me that the recent harvest was ­diabolical and that we ought to start buying up olio asap.

But I digress. The price of the oil that propels cars and whatnot is plummeting, causing mayhem in the industry but joy among motorists. There are job losses and goodness knows what else. As ever, panic is the default mode of companies which cannot see further than the end of their hoses. My recommendation is that instead of selling oil off cheaply they should store it for a rainy day, thereby ensuring plentiful stocks for the future. This might also help keep cars off roads, which would reduce pollution.

But as things stand they will go on extracting it and we will be encouraged to guzzle it until the last, black drop is drained. Insane.

SATURDAY

EL Capitan has been conquered by two American climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson. Watching it on TV in Staggs, various topers remarked that you would need to be short of a piton or two to want to do something as scary as that. One stared longingly into his pint and declared: "Yi widnae catch me doing that." Given that in recent years he has never climbed anything steeper than a bar stool this was the sort of remark best filed under "Bilge". What everyone was keen to know, however, is what the two climbers did when they needed to relieve themselves. I am reliably informed that when they micturate their urine evaporates in Yosemite's thin, dry air. Otherwise they use toilet sacks, called "wag bags", which when full are handed to helpers who dispose of them. Not, one imagines, a job for which there is a huge demand.