WITH just over a week to go before the big vote, you could cut the tension with a chainsaw. I am referring of course to Edinburgh's equivalent of the election in Iraq, the referendum on the congestion charge which could yet see the outbreak of civil war. Council leader Donald Anderson is leading the "yes" campaign, employing the stagecraft of a seasoned politician to persuade the capital's wealthy burghers to part with a couple of quid per day to bring their cars within the city's choked precincts.

"Even Ken Livingstone's Tory hairdresser now says it [the introduction of the congestion charge in London] is the 'biggest improvement' to the quality of life since she divorced her husband, " says Mr Anderson, as if he's just delivered a knockout punch.

While one ponders what exactly a hairdresser is doing with Red Ken's few surviving strands, my dear friend Tina Woolnough, founder member of Edinburgh Communities Against Congestion Charging - "an apolitical umbrella group" - has been putting the case against. She, too, invokes Mr Livingstone but seems more concerned with two "doughnuts" around which cars may be travelling in future. Her argument is that, come the congestion charge, cars will be forced out of the city centre and off the bypass and "will revert to using residential streets in the 'doughnut'".

Confused? You certainly should be. I am impressed, however, by the level of interest Edinburgh's local paper, the Hootsmon, has generated in this fascinating topic.

As I write, the vote seems too close to call. But I have a sneaking feeling though that one Ian Armstrong has his finger on the pulse when he says: "Yes to the congestion charge if it thins out the traffic in the city centre." Mr Armstrong gives as his address Maputo, Mozambique.

Help ma Boab, The Sun's slap-happy

FOR reasons best known to itself, The Sun has turned its merciless spotlight on the Scottish celebs it would "love to slap". To which, one might ask, why doesn't it? Among those listed are sitting ducks, such as Darius (derided for his alleged friendship with Geri Halliwell) and Gail Porter ("her last job was opening a caravan show"), television presenters, including the BBC's Dougie Vipond ("inoffensive face of sport in Scotland") and Scotsport's Sarah O ("why?"), and sundry politicians, from Jack McConnell ("vain, vindictive and sleekit") through Cathy Jamieson ("has the look of a Saturday market trader without the moon boots") to Nicola Sturgeon ("new look has brought her up to about 1977").

I was upset, however, to see my old comrade, Bob Wylie, mentioned in the same inglorious company. According to the Currant Bun, Help Ma Boab, the acceptable face of Reporting Scotland, "interviews people as if he has them by the lapels". This is a criticism?

Actually, it's more like he has them by something that nearly rhymes with "lapels".

Recently, Mr Wylie was in the Gorbals, in clammy pursuit of the story about the chap who was shot by police on suspicion of carrying a gun when in fact it was a brolly.

Eager to find an eyewitness, he spied a chap in a Barbour and asked him if he'd seen anything.

Indeed he had, he said, he'd watched the whole drama unfold from his flat. While Mr Wylie waited for his cameraman to set up, the interviewee mentioned that he'd once had occasion himself to take the British constitution to task. In relation to what? queried Mr Wylie.

"As the illegitimate son of Edward and Mrs Simpson, " said the publicspirited fellow. "Have a look at my arm. The veins are arranged in the design of the Union Jack."

Whereupon the BBC's camera developed a mysterious technical fault and Mr Wylie told his man on the scene that his services would no longer be required.

Present of Prezza is unenlightening

IT used to be that when the Queen came to visit she took her own toilet seat. When Tony Blair dropped in on Sharon Williams at her two-bedroom flat in North London he brought along - according to the Daily Mirror - "a teapot and four mugs, plus John Prescott, as a house-warming gift". Leaving aside the burning question - who the teapot might have been and who the mugs? - what on Earth did Mr Blair think Ms Williams would do with his pugnacious deputy? Put a shade on his head and pass him off as a standard lamp?

No surprise as digi radio wins listeners

GREG Dyke, no less, says that digital radio has become "the iPod for the over 50s". By a spooky coincidence, it was announced a few days later that the audience for Terry Wogan's breakfast show on Radio 2 attracts an audience of eight million a week, an increase of 400,000. I suspect these two facts are related, but the diary's elite squad of researchers have been unable to confirm it. After a somewhat dodgy start digital radio has begun to take off and how. In December the number of people with digital radios passed the million mark. By the end of this year, double that number will have access to it.

Come 2008, it will be in more than seven million homes.

It is not hard to discover why. I refer you to the television schedules which nightly are empty of anything that would interest anyone with a functioning brain cell. For reasons which I am too ashamed to relate I recently found myself watching an episode of Coronation Street, extolled last weekend by my normally sane colleague, Barry Didcock, as one of the wonders of the television age.

It was the mental equivalent of being assaulted by a mobile phone conversation on the bus.

In contrast, radio resonates with intelligent, well-researched and entertaining programmes, to the extent that one feels guilty at missing so much, especially now that there is easy access to the World Service and other stations only on digital.

The notable exception is Radio Scotland, whose mediocrity has become too tiresome to detail. It too is on digital which a friendly sports scribe thought might be useful in his line of work. Alas, it seems not to be available in crucial places, such as football grounds. What you might call a classic own goal.

Interminable Forsyth saga

WITHOUT wishing to be accused of insensitivity, I was amazed to learn that Lord Forsyth of Drumlean was still extant, not having heard a cheep from him for a wee while. But up he popped on Monday, blithering about Holyrood and calling for the abolition of all 129 MSPs, a handful of whom may even be Tories. The money saved, sniffed Lord Snooty, could then be spent on doctors, nurses and teachers, "who might be more useful." Note the word "might". When the great peer was merely Michael he was not known for throwing dollops of cash to anybody who "might" be useful.

Moreover, it is rather rich of member of the Lords to accuse MSPs of having low workloads. Those in glasshouses and all that.

But then this is a drum that Lord Snooty has banged before. In May last year, for example, he said something very similar. I suspect he is suffering from that nigh-terminal condition which afflicts many redundant politicians, an overweening desire to draw attention to himself. Does no-one have a spare pasture in which he could be left to graze?

Don't grouse about the deer hunter

FOR many moons now Microsoft and myself have been locked in mortal combat from which there can only emerge one winner: Bill Gates. In one's darker moments when, say, one's computer has crashed obliterating a lifetime's toil, one is consoled that Mr Gates is spending his billions philanthropically on a scale which makes Carnegie's charity seem insignificant. Last week alone he gifted pounds-750 million on vaccines for Africa. By the time he dies, he says he intends to give away "the vast majority" of his fortune, currently estimated at pounds-24.5 billion. It must be like giving away Turkey or Greece.

Nearer home, and on a somewhat slighter scale, there is Sigrid Rausing. A Swede who inherited a mint from her grandfather who developed the Tetra Pak milk and juice carton, Ms Rausing gave away around pounds-10m last year to good causes. This year she intends to give away even more. Eventually she hopes her benefactions will settle down at around pounds-15 per annum.

Ms Rausing spends as much time as she can at Coignafearn, her Scottish estate, to which she has invited grouse - whether famous or not - to return. Many are said to have taken up her offer. In order to make the land habitable for them, however, she had to cull deer which were playing havoc with the habitat.

Her neighbours, she says, could not decide whether she was "a mad deer killer or an equally mad ecologist".

Among them perhaps was Sir Jack Hayward, whose plans to erect hideous wind turbines on his 13,000-acre estate near Loch Ness she vigorously opposes. She may like to note that Sir Jack, who was big in Wolverhampton, lists among his hobbies in Who's Who "preserving the British landscape" and "keeping all things bright, beautiful and British".

Fiddling around with a G-string

A WEEK is a long time in classical music. When Nicola Benedetti was given a pounds-1m contract she let it be known that she wanted to be taken seriously as an artiste. No one, she insisted, would catch her in a wet T-shirt in a tabloid, like Vanessa Mae, another sultry violinist. But before you could say Rimsky-Korsakov here she is saying she could be tempted into a career on the catwalk if "some nice clothes come along". How long before she's on the cover of Nuts with only a fiddle to hide her bits?

Flesh to flesh, dust to dust

RIP the Erotic Review, which has gone the way of all flesh after seven silly years. Its co-founders were Jamie Maclean, son of Sir Fitzroy, reputed to have been the model for James Bond, and a fellow art dealer, Tim Hobart. Together they were known as "the Two Fat Ladies of porn". The public face - if one may put it so prudishly - of the magazine was its editor Rowan Pelling. She lamented its passing and that of "a saucier, larger-rumped era, when a man could flirt outrageously with a corseted strumpet and not get carted off by the sex police."

Down boys, down.

aftaylor2000@aol. com