There being no moonshine or chewing tobacco available in my local Scotmid I settle down to watch BBC4's three-hour country music marathon with a mug of camomile tea and a Tunnock's Caramel Log for sustenance.

The highlight is a documentary about the great Glen Campbell, whom I once had the pleasure of interviewing in a motel room.

The motel in question wasn't the one in the Joshua Tree National Park where country great Gram Parsons breathed his last. It wasn't in Campbell's hometown of Delight, Arkansas, or even in the United States. It was in Brentwood, Essex, and Campbell opened the door in his underpants because he'd forgotten I was coming. He'd been "relaxing" ahead of a gig in the town by watching the golf on television. He likes golf, and used to play with Alice Cooper from time to time. Quite a picture, isn't it?

The golf stayed on while we talked but Campbell had the good grace to mute the sound – just as well, because at one point he leaned over and crooned the opening lines of Galveston into my tape recorder.He also told me about the first time he heard what would become his signature song, Wichita Lineman: it was on a Sunday morning in Los Angeles and it was played to him by its composer, Jimmy Webb, on an old barrel organ. He also said Webb told him that it, Galveston and By The Time I Get To Phoenix were all written about the same girl.

My local Scotmid may one day stock moonshine and chewing tobacco: they'll never stock stories like that.

Gwyneth Paltrow, actress and creator of some of the most complicated fruit smoothies known to man, has launched a travel app. It's called The Goop City Guides and so far it covers New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris. I'm sure she'll get round to Glasgow in time for the Commonwealth Games.

The Hollywood star is discussing the guides at an event in the Big Apple today, and among the confidences she shares with her audience is this one: "When I moved to England, I didn't know that if you have an emergency, you don't dial 911".

I don't know about you, but I really would not take travel advice from this woman.

The strangest aspect of today's news that Sir Alex Ferguson is to retire after 185 years as manager of Manchester United – yes, even stranger than the pundits ignoring Paulo Di Canio when drawing up the list of likely replacements – is the fact that it all leaked out during a golf match between staff and players at a plush course in Cheshire (Alice Cooper and Glen Campbell weren't invited).

Now, it used to be the case that there were three universal truths which could be applied to all British footballers: that they liked glamour models, opened pubs when their playing days were over and played golf – that last being a demonstration of their roots, if they were Scottish, or, if they came from the army of working-class northern English kids who populated the leagues in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, of their ascent to the middle classes by dint of their talent with a ball and a £12 a week wage packet.

Today's Premiership footballers are different. They're as likely to hail from Senegal or Sao Paulo as from Sunderland or Salford. They still like glamour models and with their seven-figure annual salaries they could open any number of pubs in any number of countries, but it's hard to believe that golf looms large in the lives of these over-paid prima donnas. True, Manchester City's Carlos Tevez is prone to mime a golf swing as a goal celebration but as is clear from the time Sky Sports analysed it – "Chicken wing right elbow," tutted their golf pro guy as he watched the footage, "that's very unfortunate" – his time spent on the links is limited.

Perhaps Fergie's retirement marks the end of an era in more ways than are already obvious.

Anyone know the Gaelic for Game Of Thrones? Sadly the smash-hit HBO fantasy series hasn't yet arrived on BBC Alba – we still have 86 more series of Machair to enjoy first – so I can't know if Dothraki, the fictitious language invented for the show by The Language Creation Society's David Peterson, will be subtitled accordingly if it ever does.

I do learn today, however, that such is the global popularity of Game Of Thrones that Dothraki is now more widely heard than Welsh and both the Irish and Scottish flavours of Gaelic.

You can probably add Manx and Cornish to that list too, though I'm not sure about Klingon.

If you've waded through the diary entries for Wednesday and Thursday, you might like to know that the Dothraki for "chicken wing right elbow" is "jiz felde hajekh vem". There is no verb "to putt".

Psst, wanna buy a church? Fans of property porn who desire a little more ooh-la-la than they get from Grand Designs can log on to the Church of Scotland website and click on the bit offering church properties for sale. Whizz past the dull stuff (there's plenty of it and most of it's pebble-dashed) and you'll soon find the main event: St Stephen's Church in Edinburgh, the magnificent Playfair-designed edifice which has looked up St Vincent Street to George Street since 1827, the year Sir Alex Ferguson took over at Manchester United. Now it's for sale, yours for somewhere north of £500,000. How far north is a question only the Almighty can answer, though I imagine an estate agent might also venture an opinion.

Fans of property porn who also count themselves fans of Albanian mime and Polish performance theatre – I'm sure there are one or two reading – will recall that in its most recent incarnation the church served as a Fringe venue.

You can also glimpse it briefly in David Mackenzie's film Young Adam and, if you've ever seen artist Nathan Coley's 2004 work The Lamp Of Sacrifice, you'll have seen a scale cardboard model of it nestling among scale cardboard models of each of the other 285 churches in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages. I picked it out quite easily, but then I lived behind it for almost a decade and used to cut through the adjoining car park on my way to the pub.

I also remember Tiffany's, a nightclub adjoining the church on the other side. Little Richard once played there.

That car park is no more, unfortunately, built on by those with their own grand designs on the Edinburgh property market. Little Richard is still with us (or was at the time of writing) but Tiffany's has also been flattened.

I hope the same fate does not befall St Stephen's Church. I don't have the funds to buy it but perhaps I can crowdsource enough cash to let me take it off the Kirk's hands.

So I say again: psst, wanna buy a church? One careful owner ...