Burgers by the bushel

The story is about land, more particularly about the site on which

McCormick (UK), which make sauces for McDonald's, wants to have Wimpey

build it a new factory.

Remember the Camp Coffee people, who made and sold that liquid essence

in a bottle (a little of it is still on the market, mostly for

flavouring coffee cakes and buns)? They are now McCormick, with an

existing factory in East Lane, Paisley, where they make delicious sauces

to go with McDonald's fare.

The parent company, based in Baltimore, Maryland, is old and

conservative but still growing fast and proclaiming that it is ''the

world's biggest business in herbs, spices, and flavourings''.

The Paisley factory supplies sauces for McDonald's hamburgers right

across Europe from Iceland to Moscow.

Land for the new factory has changed hands many times. It was once the

property of Paisley Abbey. Strathclyde Regional Council and Renfrew

District Council now appear to have sway over it or its use. The trouble

is that since the old days, when it was a farm, there is a right held by

the abbey to draw an annual rent from it in the form of meal and barley.

Presentation of the rent could be either in bushels and pecks or the

equivalent in pounds Scots to be paid to the minister or the second

minister. There is a figure of #17 17s 2d Scots but, as the pound Scots

was worth only about 1s 6d sterling when it went out of circulation,

that is merely coppers in contemporary equivalent, if anything at all.

A minor, historical oddity it may be, yet nevertheless a fascinating

bone on which lawyers can chew.

Not that it represents an obstruction to the final outcome about the

siting of the new factory, which has regrettably been delayed to the

extent that the Diary, considering the value of the new jobs it would

bring to Paisley, feels that somebody like Scottish Enterprise or the

Renfrewshire Enterprise Company should speed a solution.

The abbey certainly is not looking for bushels or pecks or pounds

Scots, the minister, the Rev. Alan Birss, assures me. In fact he thought

the whole quaint caper would make an interesting item for his parish

magazine.

Bear-faced check

HARRIS tweed can be thornproof but, according to recent evidence, it

is certainly not recession-proof. A lot of looms have been stilled and

weavers unemployed.

Mrs Rachel McSween, one of the members of the co-operative, Scalpay

Isle Knitwear, has come up with a bright, new idea -- teddy bears made

from Harris tweed.

A housewife who lives on the island, she uses off-cuts of tweed from

the mills in Stornoway. Examples were on show recently at the Scottish

Gift Fair in Aviemore.

Personally, I'm not sure I could cuddle up to something hairy called

Angus -- Mrs McSween bestows individual names on all of them -- in my

cot. However, I wish her enterprise well. She has received her first

order from a store.

As well as a name, each teddy is given its own, distinctive facial

features. All the components used are strictly in accordance with

British standards for safety.

With the basic materials coming from off-cuts of tweed, some are

self-coloured and others are checked, a visually striking innovation in

teddy evolution.

How did she come up with the idea? ''There is nothing much you can do

on Scalpay,'' says Mrs McSween.

Mrs Kluge has a

new goal in life

IF I read or hear another word about Mar Lodge, I may need to learn

how to blanch.

John Werner Kluge, aged 76, reputedly the richest man in America,

bought it for his third wife, Patricia, a former belly dancer, allegedly

because on Royal Deeside she could be a near neighbour of the Queen at

Balmoral. They were quite pally with the royals, anyway. Didn't Prince

Charles and Diana spend part of their 10th wedding anniversary

celebrations on his 200ft yacht in the Mediterranean?

The Kluges were divorced last year and Mar Lodge had to be sold --

along with one of his other many possessions, the Harlem Globetrotters.

Patricia received quite a decent settlement, reputedly $1000m.

Now she has turned to a surprising business venture -- football cards,

bigger and better than the ones that came out of cigarette packets in

the old, old days. Shooting Stars, currently in some British newsagents,

are from a contract publisher run by her Kluge Investments.

The cards, a very limited number of which have been signed by the

pictured player (imagine what that cost among the archly venal maestros

of the soccer game), are for collection by fans and are also on sale in

Holland and Italy.

The commercial incentive seems to have come from the massive sales of

baseball cards in the US, which has apparently grown to be a cult. In

Europe the company producing Shooting Stars hopes to gross $25m in the

first year.

I'm in the market for swopping one Ruud Gullit card for 25 Charlie

Nicholases -- plus a cash adjustment, of course.

Dressing for

the occasion

WHEN Hugh Lang, the Glasgow man who is chairman of P-E International,

the management and computer consultancy employing more than 1000 people,

bought David Bellamy Associates he was due to meet the bearded professor

with the guard-dog voice and the lumberjack dress sense.

Quickly, he ran back into the house and changed from normal city garb

into his Barbour jacket and green gumboots. Bellamy turned up in a suit,

collar, and tie.

DBA, an environmental consultancy that consists of about 15 young men

from Durham University and boasts an impressive list of clients, fits in

handily to the structure of P-E, started in 1934 as Production

Engineering, which this year merged with Handley-Walker, giving it

greater penetration of European and international markets.

That name P-E, by the way, may in the near future be converted to mean

Pan-European.

Meanwhile it is performing fairly well. Hugh Lang says that in the

past year it worked for no fewer than 83 of the top 100 British

companies. Normally about half of the jobs it takes on are

computer-related and half problem-solving in managerial terms.

Educated at Shawlands Academy and the old Royal Technical College (now

Strathclyde University), Hugh Lang was employed by a number of Britain's

biggest companies before joining P-E in 1961.

One of his most pleasurable discoveries on a recent trip to Glasgow

was finding, during a rummage through his mother's old house, copies of

the now deceased Bulletin, a former sister newspaper of this one. If

only P-E had been called by the then management when its circulation was

receding in the 1960s, that bright picture paper might have been saved

for us.

Pioneers who

cut the crackle

MONTHS have passed since the Diary first divulged information about

Ampsys, the recording and telecommunications pioneers based in Paisley

College of Technology, a small company with truly cracking prospects.

Founded by Archie Pettigrew, it has won DTI Smart One and Smart Two

annual awards.

In fact there are now two companies, Ampsys Magnetics and Ampsys

Telecom. The first is still interesting manufacturers with its invention

of a method of achieving on sound tape the quality of compact disc

records.

Amplitude Telecom meanwhile has caught the attention of Philips and of

Motorola with its amplitude locked loop, a new method of decoding FM

radio signals. In other words it helps to take the crackle out of car

phones and mobile phones, the kind of disturbance that bedevils the ear

when two signals are competing for the same, very narrow frequency.

Philips has ordered a prototype. Motorola has gone further; it has

already successfully tested one at its facility in Fort Lauderdale,

Florida.

Watch this space.

Ampsys is still basically four young men, two engineers and two on the

financial and marketing side, but the Diary believes they are going

places.