AS A young man, I was doubly discriminated against, he said, nearly ending a sentence with a preposition. I could not have played for Rangers because of their embargo on recruiting anyone brought up as a Catholic.

In addition, my chances of marrying into British royalty were slim.

Had I lumbered Princess Anne from the Locarno ballroom and serial winching ensued, it is unlikely that our relationship would have prospered.

As I plighted (plought?) my troth and pressed my suit in a Sauchiehall Street bus shelter and asked Miss Windsor if she fancied becoming Mrs Shields, she would have said: "Sorry, Tam, this cannot be. For thou art a Papist and, under the Act of Settlement 1701 subsequently extended to Scotland by the Act of Union 1707, if I got hitched to you, I would be disqualified from ever getting the top job in the family business."

Rangers have abandoned their sectarian employment practices and will employ any Catholics, even Scottish ones, who might stick a few goals past the Celtic.

But Britain in the 21st century has a law that no sovereign may be "reconciled to, or shall hold communion with the See or Church of Rome, or shall profess the popish religion, or shall marry a papist".

Prime Minister Gordon Brown may or may not now address this anachronism.

As a member of this oppressed minority, I should be outraged. But I have always seen the point of the Act of Settlement.

It was enacted to rid Britain of the anti-parliamentary excesses of the House of Stuart, a shower of mad badgers who believed in the divine right of kings to run the realm to suit their whims.

I have to say it was a good result at the Battle of the Boyne when King James VII (or II of England) failed to restore a regal dictatorship.

The Grand Old Duke of York, as he was also known, was a particularly dopey individual and a major impediment to the development of a constitutional monarchy.

His grandson Charlie, of the bonnie prince variety, was even worse, proving what an unmitigated disaster a Stuart restoration would have been for Britain and Scotland in particular.

Enough of the Buffer's Potted View of History as vaguely remembered from Mr Robert Crampsey's classes at Bellarmine college of knowledge in the early 1960s.

The Act of Settlement was fine and dandy in days of yore, but all that papist stuff is an insult to modern Catholics and should be binned.

While we are renegotiating the royal family's terms of employment, how about revising in a downwards fashion the wages, expenses and number of staff on the payroll?

Earnest constitutional experts warn that tampering with the Act of Settlement will affect the role of the monarch as head of the Anglican church.

It might even lead to the disestablishment of the Church of England. I say what the heck. Let's take the risk.

THE Rev Maxwell Craig, a weel-kent Kirk minister, is reported as saying it may be a waste of national resources to strive too officiously to keep the elderly alive.

Mr Craig asks if it is wise to devote so much NHS and social work funding to the care of old people "at the risk of giving less focus to the needs of the young".

He also suggests, bravely for a chap aged 76, that "this policy may be a less than desirable aim: namely to ensure what is often a half-life for the 75 to 95-year-olds".

Most people, I suspect, would argue that half a life is better than none and would accept all the medical treatment and social support the state cares to throw in their direction.

But there is something in what the Rev Craig is saying. We're not talking senilicide here, like the Inuits who, legend has it, pop granny off on an ice floe for a final journey when she is too gumsy to masticate the seal blubber at dinner.

But there could be a re-allocation of budgets in regard to our declining years.

When my time comes, just leave me in some sunny Spanish square. Not too far from a decent restaurant where I will be fed the menu del dia by comely waitresses whose day is not complete unless they get a chance to cosset some old codger.

There will be strict instructions that I am not to be resuscitated except with the finest Spanish brandies.

Ideally, there should be a beach a short zimmer-stroll away. Ideally, the Scottish government should offer to fund this end-of-lifestyle as an alternative to paying for me to fester in an old folks' home.

I MISSED the controversy when Delia Smith got pelters for recommending we should be making our dinner out of processed food purchased in Asda.

I was away studying the Barcelona lifestyle, ironically the aspect where folk there eat very well out of tins.

They don't do Heinz spaghetti, Spam or even John West salmon. It's conservas, mostly tinned fishy things, which posh Barcelonians have always consumed at posh prices.

For instance, Albert Adría, pastry chef at his brother Ferran's world-famous El Bulli restaurant, has opened a back-to-basics tapas bar called Inopia.

One of the basics is a tin of cloisses de Brujula (clams to me and you) that sells for 23 which is nearly £20 as sterling slumps against the euro.

The Brujula clams are described as "hand-picked". This is no great recommendation to me since an awful lot of the Spanish tinned fishy things look as if they have been hand-picked from some marine nasal cavity.

But I have persevered. The zamburinas (scallops) with red peppers in olive oil are delicious. So is the scallop paté out of a can.

The sea urchins and white bins are interesting, a distant cousin of Mr Heinz's tins of beans with pork sausages.

I will pass on the wood-smoked cod livers in their own oil.

The ventresca (or belly) of the bonito or white tuna is an acquired taste and inferior, in my opinion, to the fillets that come in a jar, not a tin.

It has to be said, however, that fresh is best.

Should you be tempted to seek out Senor Adría's tapas bar, my advice is don't bother. It is so back to basics, you have to queue behind a velvet rope to get in.

This kind of Barcelona sophistication has failed to rub off on the Buffer, who remains more Matalan than Catalan.

THE private view of the Glasgow Art Fair is one of the great social events of the year. You can sip a gratis Tanqueray and tonic while observing the well-heeled musing over whether to purchase a Damien Hirst practical joke for £40,000 or a slip of paper (one in a series of 400) by Picasso for £20,000.

I was told of a sighting of a six-figure transaction for some canvasses by Ken Currie. These were not his works celebrating working-class values but from a group of paintings "concerned with how the human body is affected by illness, ageing and physical injury".

Not too cheery a topic but the paintings are striking. More power, we say, to Mr Currie's paintbrush and his wallet.

I was tempted by an item on display at the Peacock Gallery stand. It was an installation of 60 empty Irn-Bru bottles.

This oeuvre was competitively priced at £6. The redemption value of the 60 bottles at your corner shop is £12, a profit of £6 or the cost of entry to the art fair.

This struck a chord since I have been considering getting out of stocks and shares and property and fine art and putting all my investments into a portfolio of ginger bottles.

The fiscal ingenuity of the Peacock Gallery is undoubtedly down to the fact it is based in Aberdeen.

We anticipate more of this astuteness as the Peacock leads an initiative to build a new centre for contemporary arts in the granite city at a cost of £12 million.

Or 60 million ginger bottles.