THE need for connectivity is crucial, so experts tell us.

I agree, even though I'm not sure what connectivity is. Something to do with the internet, I suppose.

I once mentioned the internet to a barfly in my favourite howff. "Do you use it?" I asked. "For what?" he replied, as if I was talking about a monkey wrench. I then asked if he had an iPod or an iPad. I might as well have asked him if he had an iPatch. "I've been to the Thai Pad, though," he said. "Lovely food. I had the Goong Lui Kloang." Lest I be unable to pronounce it he wrote it down. I said: "The trouble with you is that you're a Luddite." "Step outside and say that," he said, whereupon the conversation reverted to the travails of Heart of Midlothian FC, about which we both soon agreed there is nothing more to be said.

EVENTS in the Ukraine are unfolding so fast it is hard to keep pace with them. My lookalike, Vladimir Putty-Face, is not in a good place, as we say as we drive in our armoured vehicle through downtown Tranent.

One is inclined to agree with Angela Merkel when she questioned whether he is in touch with reality. Having said which, has Mr Putty-Face ever been in touch with reality? The same goes for many of the lickspittles who speak on his behalf.

One, from Moscow's Institute of Blithering Eejits, a septic think tank, lost his rag at Channel 4's Matt Frei, yelling repeatedly: "Why you interrupting me! Why you interrupting me!" Mr Frei, meanwhile, was a model of restraint, as we all must be when faced with such tubes. Needless to say, the Home Secretary is following developments keenly. She is most interested when Moscovites are interviewed in their own homes, usually in front of a shelf of books.

Under merciless interrogation, the HS confessed that what she's actually doing is looking to see if the occupants have a copy of her book, which was translated into Russian a couple of years ago and for which she is yet to receive a rouble in royalties. As one never tires of reminding her: "We can't all be Leo Tolstoy!"

IS there, one wonders, anything we can learn from Mr Putty-Face? I refer to the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Glesca.

Mr Putty-Face spent countless billions on the Winter Olympics in Sochi in the hope, we were told, of persuading "the West" that he's not a tube and that he is someone with whom we can do business without getting ripped off.

But it would appear that was a gross misreading of the situation. For while we were all glued to the curling, Mr Putty-Riot was oiling his tanks and playing with his Kalashnikovs, preparatory to the invasion of Crimea. In short, he made us look one way when he was turned the other.

We could, if we were so inclined, do something. We could use the Commonwealth Games, and the hoopla that will attend them, to divert attention from, say, a border raid, the object of which would be to annexe Berwick-upon-Tweed, Carlisle or - my preference - the whole of the Lake District.

POPE Francis now has his own magazine. Called Il Mio Pape (My Pope), it is published by Silvio Bonkersconi's publishing company, Mondadori. Each issue costs about a quid and will have a poster of the Pope which you can use to cover damp patches.

It will also contain a weekly recital of his bons mots and a comprehensive listing of the nightclubs he's attended and who he's been seen hobnobbing with in St Peter's Square.

Sources in Italia have confirmed that when Sr Bonkersconi learned of the new magazine he immediately wanted to know why there wasn't one devoted to him. Expect soon, therefore, to see Silvio, a lads' mag, on the newsstands with plenty to keep aficionados of bunga-bunga salivating.

IF you're the kind of person who is always losing your temper, chances are you'll have a heart attack or a stroke. So say researchers at Harvard.

This may explain why we in Scotia suffer so badly from these scourges. I, of course, am calm personified. Rarely do I "lose it". Who does, I wonder, as I stand zen-like in the ticket queue at Queen Street reading the signs telling me that ScotRail staff have the right not to suffer abuse or be spat upon.

One used to be able to let off steam at football matches, but no more. Ditto newspaper offices. I once worked for an editor who shouted so loudly at a member of staff he made the poor fellow's nose bleed.

That takes talent. Anywhere else he would have been wrapped in a straitjacket and thrown into a padded cell. Another got so angry that instead of kicking a bin he jumped into it, whereupon he couldn't release his foot and had to go around for the rest of the day with a shoe on one foot and a bin on the other. I jest. I recommend that those prone to temper tantrums do likewise.

RACHEL Johnston, insufferable sister of sinister Boris, has been writing about the poor, having become an expert on them after appearing on Famous, Rich and Hungry, in which she learned what it's like to be dependent on food banks.

Consequently, she says, she feels guilty about spending £3 on a cup of crap coffee. "The poor people you see on the box are all fat," she says. "How, in God's name, can you be overweight and hungry? Now I know."

She's conscience-stricken but consoles herself with the fact that her yummy-mummy chums are jealous, because they've never met people who are skint. "Bizarrely," she adds, "I think there's a lot of envy. 'Lucky old Rachel, she went on poverty safari.' An experience they can never have, even with all the money they've got."

Verily, words fail me.