A COLLEAGUE once asked me when I was typing my witterings what my column was about.

Clacking to the end of a sign-off so lame it would have been offered a seat on a busy bus, I replied: "It is about 750 words."

The world, now being bigger and better, my column is now 850 words. So it meets one of those requirements.

The sheer, perplexing nonsense therein has some searching in these paragraphs for some kind of rational thoug. In vain. This column has hidden shallows.

The same cannot be said, of course, for Don McLean, the songster. He is the writer of American Pie, a densely allusive song that has earned millions of dollars and intrigued millions of listeners. He is always asked what it means. His best reply is: "It means I never have to work again."

He is selling the manuscripts to the song and these may provide an end of to some of the mystery, though frankly I have found more mysterious things at the bottom of my fridge. It is a song about banished innocence that references Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan and others. It is not the musical equivalent of the Enigma code.

No, the most perplexing thing in the world is not how the pyramids were built, whether there is a benign deity or, even, why a car only breaks down in atrocious weather and miles from home.

No, it is the rugby scrum. Students a century on will look back on these and believe them to be the mating ritual of a primitive tribe. They may just be right. There seems no other reason for its existence.

Once scrums may have been trials of strength and technique. They may also have been necessary to allow people of a certain shape an opportunity to play a team sport. They were also a necessary punctuation in a free-flowing match. But no longer.

Scrums are now the adverts of world rugby. They allow the television viewer the chance to pop into the kitchen for refreshments as 16 men slowly creep forward and the engage with a pop so brutal one expects to see a rivet shooting out of the top of the subsequently formed edifice.

This oddly gripping spectacle, though, cannot disguise the absence of purpose. Its interest, too, tends to dwindle as it is repeated so often one believes the BBC has the copyright on it.

So, what is as scrum for? It is not to reduce the strength of the forwards through repeated battering. After all, they are replaced, sometimes after 50 minutes.

It is not to provide a restart to the game. First, that could be done in a manner of ways, most notably by a lineout. Second, the scrum, even when it works, is as fair as Senga from a Maryhill tanning salon. The scrum half put-in is so much of a feed that I swear I saw one using a spoon.

The big problem with the scrum is that few know what is going on. And those that do, namely the front row, are not telling. And when they do tell, they lie. This leaves the referee in a haze of bewilderment, ignorance and confusion only normally experienced by a Saturday sports columnist.

People who have played international rugby in the front row and have also attained refereeing qualifications (Brian Moore, for example) can be hesitant as to why a scrum has collapsed.

The referee, in contrast, has to come to a decision immediately, usually awarding a penalty on the basis of what seems like whim. The only nod to fairness is that the ref regularly gives penalties alternately to each side. The major occasions for penalties are, of course, binding and boring. The whole spectacle is boring when it is repeated to such a level that running rugby seems to be getting in the way of a good, dishonest scrum.

There was a moment in the Ireland v France match when the referee seemed to be constructing a scrum with the precision and focus of a 12-year-old of yore assembling a Meccano project. He shouted to 16 men to keep it straight, to lift it just six inches, to take it easy. It was as if he was shifting a piano up a set of stairs, though, of course, it was not as exciting as that.

It leaves the spectator in the stadium deeply frustrated and the viewer at home fiddling with the remote control in a bid to find something more captivating, such as the craft show that teaches one to create a lace hankie for the prop of one's choice.

There are two problems with the scrum. The first is that it has to be explained and one awaits Don McLean's manuscripts to see if American Pie has the answer. It certainly has a reference.

I can't remember if I cried

When I saw the scrum had heaved and died

But something touched me deep inside

In the hours I sat and sighed

The second is that the scrum needs to be refereed judiciously and competently. Over to you, Willie Collum.