I UNDERSTAND that this evening there is to be a meeting between members and working parties of GHK and Glasgow Accies regarding the placement of a combined or merged side into league competition as soon as possible, perhaps next year.

A name has been suggested - let's hope it's not West of Scotland - and the greater plan is for a combined building development, costing more than a million pounds, to cater for an all inclusive Anniesland site that will include most of the sports on offer. At the moment, GHK have started the construction of all weather pitches.

However, any combative Glasgow side has to ensure that it keeps its players, and so far Chris Docherty, Geoff Caldwell and Gordon McIlwham have all been approached by Edinburgh clubs, and Lee Stewart has gone to England.

qJIM Aitken is to be in hospital this week for an operation, and I wish him well.

I like and respect Jim Aitken. However, I'd like to take the idea of another kind of internal inquiry a little further. The famous four, David Sole, Finlay Calder, Gavin Hastings, and Jim Aitken have shouted down ''SRU plants'' at their meetings I hear. A trifle paranoid is it not?

What was Keith Robertson at the SRU's latest strategy document meetings? An SFDR plant? Whoever has been advising the famous four on their media presence ought to quit now.

I have never, ever, been a fan of the SRU, but no-one wins a war. The famous four have claimed to campaign on the issues, which is only partly true. They have started a rugby war, gone for profile, dragged the game through the mud, and already their once-great reputations are casualties.

They have accelerated what was always going to happen, but in flinging mud around they must accept that some of it sticks to them. In refusing to hear contrary arguments at their meetings, they are, in fact, as intransigent as the SRU itself. Aye, power, it's a dreadful thing.

qTHE Diary always tries to broaden the minds of readers, and so it is that we tell you of a little tale involving the Australian club Randwick, who went to Uruguay three weeks ago for a tournament.

It took place at Cologne, near capital city Montivideo, and it was won by Hindu Argentina. Randwick, sadly, were knocked out of the semi-finals in strange circumstances.

Fifty penalties were awarded against them in their last game, five of them in the last four minutes of the match. The game itself was played after midnight following a blackout, and ended suddenly after the locals had hit the front by a single point.

Randwick were also forced to stay in five different hotels in the one-week visit while their officials spent 20 minutes on the sidelines before one game arguing with a referee who could speak only broken English and would not allow a prop to wear head gear.

qIT was good to meet up with Colin Baillie, that great teacher of rugby at Millburn school in Inverness, at the Highland dinner last Friday night.

I went up there after the kids' tournament at Murrayfield, yes the one where my son's team stuck bananas up the exhaust pipe of the bus belonging to the Welsh team that had beaten them. The bus could not start.

Anyway, within minutes of arriving, and spying both Baillie and Nairn MacEwan, word got to me that Baillie has a line going that I prevented him from ''getting an MBE'' after I had spread an apocryphal story about him. Baillie, one of the best men I have ever met, denies it, but he is alleged to have said to master Peter Phillips, the then captain of Gordonstoun, upon the tossing of a coin: ''Right master Phillips, tails - or grannie?''

qA TALE to warm your body and make your heart sing reaches us from the land of veterans rugby.

GHK golden oldies were playing a side from Manchester at the weekend, when the English lads substituted their winger for a chap who looked extremely large about the girth and very out of condition. The GHK stand-off saw one of the opposition team's members walk up and whisper in the ear of the home side's man entrusted with marking the chap.

''He asked me to go easy on their winger,'' said the substitutes marker when asked what was going on. ''He has, they say, just had two heart attacks.''