THERE I was on Monday in the Horseshoe Bar: it was the launch of

National Pub Week. There was a whole wheen of boys and girls from one of

Tennants pubs and hotels, The Boswell Hotel, a favoured haunt of mine.

Jings it was grand. You got free halfs and the little ones guzzled

bottles of beer and splendid young ladies in little black skirts and

lacy peenies were jouking about serving sausage rolls and canapes and

half of the licensed trade was there telling you how good their

businesses were. Except they weren't.

Underlying every conversation with any businessmen and women for the

past few years is how bad the recession has actually been for them. But

what these people tell you constantly is not how good the company is.

What they tell you is how good the product is. In this they are not

telling lies if they are decent people, and great gobs of nonsense if

they are accountants.

On Monday I found myself in the company of the Scullions, father and

son, who run a famous bakery in Rutherglen, just outside Glasgow. There

I am sharing a libation with Richard and his son and the both of them

telling me about the pies they deliver to the Horsehoe Bar and other

outlets of Mr Tennants. And do you know he was boasting at that?

Well of course he was because his pies are great. and nothing wrong

with the rest of his products. I have written many times before of

people who make splendid products. Products is my word for today's

sermon. Because I had an argument with a wealthy businessman friend of

mine but the other day. He told me that the business of business was

business. He was rather pleased with the epigram. Being in fact a

trained accountant it was difficult to explain to him that this had come

from one of the worst and most discredited Presidents of the US of A. It

was Cleveland. I think.

It doesn't matter because a quote as thick as that doesn't need a

credit. It could have been Hoover. Come to think of it, it could have

been Thatcher. Her ''There is no such thing as Society'' comes close to

President Warren Hastings' immortal ''Back to normalcy'' slogan. All of

the absurd people quoted above are pure Babbitry. Babbits abounding from

their burrows, the burrows of not much sense, little education, and a

sense of such petit-bourgeois greediness that it would turn your

stomach.

Bear with me, I have not much further to go before I hope to make

myself clear. A letter in yesterday's Herald talked of this subject and

I am not sure what our correspondent meant. He was talking of the

functions of the board of any company. Said it was quite simply to make

money for its owners '' -- even if it was a newspaper''.

The truth is that newspapers don't make money anyway, never have.

Maxwell bankrupted everything to run rather rotten newspapers. Murdoch

is selling his rags at a price everybody but his own industry can

afford. Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook that is, lost fortunes on his

blatts. The difference between the first two and the last one is that

Beaverbrook, slighty mad as he was, and horribly egocentric still tried

to produce a . . . product. A quality one. One he wanted to be proud of.

When Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most successful film directors of

all time, finally croaked at an advanced age it was discovered that he

had a little over $3000 in his bank account. The rest had been spent in

making films. Hitchcock lived exceedingly well no doubt, but he spent

his all in making films. In making a product. He spent his money not for

making money but for making films.

He didn't look for any more profit than it takes to make the next

film. I was talking to Peter Broughan who produced the recent successful

Rob Roy film and who produced Tutti Frutti among many other things.

Peter knows that any of the companies he works with make money to make

more products. The Scullion family who make pies and not pictures are

proud of what they offer to the public.

Doubtless their accountants can tell them many ways out of financial

constraints -- make your pies out of the offal of cows' eyelids, add

sawdust or plaster of Paris, or arsenical compunds to increase the

spice. The accountants can tell you everything about business. It simply

doesn't occur to them that making more money for a company and its

dreadful shareholders will result in being poisoned by pies, eggs,

pictures and, at the end of the day, by newspapers.

I wouldn't know because I don't just do what I do for money. But I'm

thinking of it. So are the accountants and all the time at that.