NEVER in my wildest dreams as a boy in Househillwood did I imagine that a gorgeous blonde such as Kelly Cooper Barr would invite me over the Brock Burn for an evening of champagne and canapés.

I should explain. Kelly Cooper Barr is an It girl, not as in computer support but as in fashion guru, lifestyle model, and organiser extraordinaire of parties. Kelly was in charge of the opening soirée for Silverburn, the hugest and latest shopping experience in Glasgow.

Silverburn is located just across the Brock Burn, where I was born and brought up. It occupies what was once a large area of football pitches and wild, recreational green grun. It was my childhood field of dreams.

Now it is Silverburn, a state-of-the-art consumer paradise home to Marks & Spencer and many more. The creators of Silverburn claim it is quite green ecologically and even a bit sylvan for a place which consists of 75 acres of stores and parking for 2500 cars.

It does not, for instance, have a food court like other run-of-the-mill malls. It has a garden where you can dine "in a natural setting, the sun on your back, surrounded by living, breathing trees with water gently flowing by".

A bit like when we used to ford the Brock Burn and do a spot of campfire cooking. But a lot of ecological collateral damage has been sustained in the transition over the years in which the Brock Burn has become the Silverburn.

We used to have wildlife. Catfish, baggie minnows, leeches, water rats. Brock means badger but there was little sign of that species. There were occasional sightings of beaver when the boys and girls were playing in the long grass, but we had better not go too deeply into that.

I suppose that if they are going to build over your green and pleasant childhood, there is some consolation that the result is a Xanadu of shopping.

There have been some disparaging comments that Silverburn is for the wealthy folk from surrounding areas and the natives from the reservation may get jobs but cannot afford to shop there. Some have even suggested that Silverburn's impact locally will be mainly to give a boost to the secondary trading in illegally sourced luxury goods in the pubs of Nitshill.

This is a terrible slur on us Pollokites who these days have plenty of disposable income - at least until they take the credit cards away.

I am not a great one for shopping centres but the Silverbrockburn will be worth a visit. It is just a shame that it wasn't there 50 years ago. I could have waded across the burn to the garden dining area and popped into Yo Sushi and had some sashimi or teriyaki off the conveyer belt.

On reflection, we were quite well catered for by Mr Pisaneschi's fish and chip van at the Peat Road roundabout. His tempura potato slices (or fritters as we call them) were delicious.

AS one who takes a passing interest in how asylum seekers are treated, I spent a few hours in the immigration courts housed in the forbidding black tower block which is the Eagle building in Glasgow's Bothwell Street.

I did so in an attempt to understand better the processes by which the British Home Office decides who is fit to stay in Scotland and who is to be dispatched back to the country and political system from which they have fled.

My natural inclination is that if people from other lands make such an effort to come and live and work in Scotland they should be allowed to do so, if they are prepared to observe the laws of the land. I understand but do not share the concerns of those who are afraid of Scotland being swamped by immigrants whose children will steal our children's jobs.

There are six courts running daily at the Glasgow asylum and immigration tribunal where appeals are heard against Home Office decisions to deny refugees the right to stay. My first impression is that these tribunals are working under such a weight of paperwork that the system is inoperable.

My second impression is that the Home Office is of the inclination that every asylum seeker should be sent back regardless of any danger they might face in their home countries.

This opinion was formed quickly and on the basis of just a few cases, such as that of the Zimbabwean who had been beaten and burnt by Mugabe's police because he had been up putting posters for the rival MDC political movement. The Home Office prosecutor said the man was not really in danger.

He was not an activist but had been paid by the MDC to put up the posters. And, the Home Office argued, he had not been further beaten while he was in hospital. If Mugabe's people were really after him, they would have pursued him to his sick bed.

A similar argument was being pursued in an adjacent court. A Palestinian had escaped from his homeland, alleging oppression from Hamas. His son had been kidnapped. His house had been riddled with bullets. A note had been left on his doorstep, advising him to get out. The Home Office claimed his account was not credible. If Hamas really wanted to get him, they would not just have left a note.

In another court, a Nigerian woman's case for being allowed to stay was that she had been trafficked and abused. The Home Office argued that she had already been repatriated from Italy under similar circumstances.

I paraphrase, but it seemed they were saying that to be trafficked once was bad luck but to be the victim twice verged on carelessness.

My impression is that these cases, with all the human tragedy involved, are conducted in a manner that would not be acceptable in a breach of the peace case at a district court.

Asylum-seeker defence appears to be at the lower of the legal aid food chain. Too often, it seems an office junior has been dispatched, unprepared, to flick desperately through mountains of paperwork and mount an ad hoc argument.

The judges I saw in action were patient and punctilious. The tribunal support staff are supportive, especially towards the children who find themselves up for judgment in the Eagle buliding.

There is a play area with cuddly toys. The children also get paper and crayons. Their drawings are pinned on a notice board. Most of the children's art features houses with a garden and flowers and birds flying free. Others show faces filled with tears.

My attempt to look at these tribunals was short and sketchy. Professor Anthony Good, a social anthropologist at Edinburgh University spent a year studying the Glasgow immigration courts and wrote a book on his findings.

I went the short distance from the Eagle building to the Mitchell Library to find his tome, Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts, but it was not in stock.

At the Mitchell, I did encounter a conference on asylum seekers. It was organised by a body called Atlas, which means Action for Training and Learning for Asylum Seekers.

Atlas is funded by the European Union, the Scottish government, Glasgow City Council, and probably many others. The conference was attended by any number of organisations active in the industry which has grown up around the asylum seeker issue.

There was on display a mountain of expensively produced literature. Asylum seekers will be relieved to know that Atlas has a development partnership structure. This involves a steering group, a monitoring and evaluation sub-group, a needs audit and analysis work group, and an information/orientation work group.

They were also handing out T-shirts with the slogan "Free in a free land". All this public money was being spent on theory and PC hype only a few hundred yards from where the Home Office were trying to pack a man back to Zimbabwe because he had not been sufficiently beaten or tortured.

Some of this public cash might be more usefully spent hiring better lawyers for the asylum seekers. Or perhaps we can just give one of those Free-in-a-free-land T-shirts to the Zimbabwean fellow as a souvenir of his time in Scotland.