IT'S ALL RELATIVE

There is, I’m told by younger tech-savvy people, an online game called Second Life where you adopt an avatar of how you would like to be and then roam through the virtual world meeting and interacting with other people pretending to be someone else – a bit like charades in cyberspace. Well, the Japanese have introduced the idea into real life and miniaturised it. You can rent out relatives, real life avatars, who will pretend to be your wife, husband, child, first lover or just anyone you’re missing, or simply hasn’t come up to scratch in real life. I think this is how Trump got Melania.

One of these agencies is called Family Romance, the inspiration apparently from an essay by Freud called The Family Romance of Neurotics, about children who believe that their parents aren’t their real ones, and the true ones are nobles or royals or, today, probably pop stars or Kardashians.

You can even hire the company to perform entirely fake weddings (or divorces) where you are the centrepiece and everyone is an actor and where, as in real life, the best man either throws up or has illicit rental sex with the bride, all for a cost of around £30,000. One man even hired fake parents for his actual wedding because his real ones were dead, neglecting even to tell his wife, who wasn’t rented.

Apparently this all started in the 1980s and the notion of rental relatives seized the public imagination, featuring in literature and film, including a one new one called The Stand-in Thief, where an orphaned burglar bonds with isolated strangers whose houses he has broken into. It’s like Home Alone in reverse.

This is all lucrative work for out of work Japanese thespians who can role play without the greasepaint and don't have to constantly audition or break off to sign on, although it demands an ability to both extemporise and remember the back story of the family you’re pretending to be part of.

A top job in this field is to be a Rental Scolder, which isn’t where you’re hired to pop round to a pub dressed as a cop to hector and embarrass, but to scold the person who has hired you as an actor and berate them for some terrible error they don’t believe they have been sufficiently punished over. It seems to work. The harakiri rates have dropped dramatically.

EYE TIME TO SORT IT OUT

If you’re in Lanarkshire and suffering from eye diseases like cataracts or glaucoma, better head to the Borders – that is if you can still see your way there. Because in Lanarkshire the progress of the disease has to be much worse - and you will have to wait considerably longer - than people in Jedburgh or Hawick, for instance, in the health board area which has the shortest time-wait and the lowest benchmark for treatment in the country.

It’s another of those postcode lotteries. There is no agreed optical and medical standard of seriousness across the country – unlike when you break your leg, or develop cancer – it’s simply down to the number of hospitals and specialists in the trust area where you happen to live. So opticians in areas with scarcity – Ayrshire is another example – have to raise the qualification for treatment. And presumably issue you with thicker glasses.

SEE YOU GIACOMO!

The only Scotsman to feature in Tuesday’s pulsating Liverpool-Roma Champions’ League semi-final was the home side’s left back Andy Robertson. The Italian daily paper Gazzetta della Sport gave its verdict on his part in the Scousers rousing 5-2 victory.

“He doesn’t have technique of the very highest level, but he runs like Satan himself and is never afraid…He was born in Glasgow and that explains everything.”

Scusami?!

IN MEMORY OF KEIR

On Good Friday Keir White got up for work in his home just outside Kilmarnock, leaving behind his phone and his wallet. He did not return. On Easter Monday his body was found in woods a few hundred yards away.

He wasn’t to know how popular he was. Social media was flooded with tributes and, within 12 hours of launching, a crowdfunding site had burst its target of raising £3000 to back charities that might have helped him. The 24-year-old was a junior footballer, lately with Darvel, and on the following Saturday a minute’s silence was held before the start of games all over Ayrshire.

Keir had problems, one of which was gambling, which he had tried to address. He had self-excluded himself from several bookmakers in Kilmarnock, which is the process whereby you tell the shop you have a problem and ask them not to take your money.

He was far from alone. In the Kilmarnock and Loudon parliamentary constituency, according to Gambling Commission estimates, there are just over 3000 regular gamblers with 673 of them either at risk or with a defined problem.

That’s more than one-in-five walking into a bookies, either to bet over the counter or, increasingly more likely, play the fixed odds betting terminals – effectively slot machines dubbed the "crack cocaine of gambling" – with each shop allowed up to four of them. A player can bet up to £100 a turn – so a punter could lose £300 a minute.

The picture is even worse in Glasgow, the betting capital of the UK. The city has more betting terminals than any other local authority in the country, 835, with more than £750 million gambled a year on the "puggies" – more than enough to fill every pothole in every road and still have change for a school or two. Problem gamblers are losing more than £10m, averaging more than £1500 each.

The UK Government launched a 12-week consultation last year on reducing stakes, without indicating to what level, and all the Scottish political parties want curbs, to as low as £2 a turn.

But for now it's as it was. On Tuesday last week Keir White's funeral was held.

+