Good connections

aiming at the ''#15 billion a year'' telecommunications market. The

privatised company not only has the wayleaves and the routes carrying

electricity but it boasts a very large telecom network of its own,

probably the biggest and most modern in the power supplies industry in

Britain.

Although it is not seriously thinking about giving British Telecom or

Mercury Communications a run for their money, to gain the merest smidgin

of that market -- perhaps by providing more competitively priced

facilities to big users such as banks, finance and investment houses --

could be encouragingly profitable.

That is why fibre-optics links are being incorporated in existing

communications between Glasgow and Edinburgh. They are also going into

the inter-connector, Strathaven-Carlisle, and I gather they will be part

of the new system carrying Scottish electricity to Northern Ireland. Who

knows, the link could go beyond that, southwards to the big

international financial centre now being established in Dublin.

The man in charge of all this is Alan Richardson, managing director

transmission. He assures me that Scottish Power is only at the formative

stages in all this . . . but who knows.

Head head-hunter

REGALING readers of the Times this week on ''the Palace, the press and

the people'' has been Dr Michael Shea, who acknowledges some joy at not

having been press secretary to the Queen since 1987. He's been back in

Scotland more often since then and is about to become chairman of a new

company of recruitment consultants with offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow

and London. I imagine the kind of people they will be looking for will

be mostly top-drawer types.

Ishbel MacInnes Manby is to be managing director and there will be two

other high-level directors whose names have yet to be announced.

''Ishbel had made a name for herself in a very short time as the best

head-hunter in Scotland,'' said Michael, a visiting professor at

Strathclyde University and chairman of Scotland in Europe, when I spoke

to him in Edinburgh the other day. Prospective titles for the new

company are being evaluated and I hear tell that MacInnes & Company may

be favoured. Formerly she was with Cockburn Blair and ASA International

in Glasgow.

Right now she is moving house with her husband, Richard, and her two

sons to Kilmaronock near Loch Lomondside.

Creating the cratur

THE correct accompaniment to Scotch whisky is a pinch of salt. Or at

least that's what you should take with a dose of the lore of

uisgebeatha, I've found.

Over the years I seem to have been subjected to a rich tapestry of

legends attendant upon the national drink, including the ones about the

magically superior waters of Glen Sheugh, the mysteries of certain

blends, and the whisky that is lost in the cask through evaporation and

is known as the angels' dram.

But Jimmy Jones of Blairs Ltd of Glasgow, designers and manufacturers

of process plant and equipment, whom I tend to believe, told me of a new

one the other day.

In distilleries a still being replaced by a newly-made one must be

matched precisely -- even down to any dents in it. This is so the

distillation of the whisky remains exactly the same. To do that,

measurements of incidental or accidental dents in these large copper

vessels are taken so that they can be replicated in the new one.

A man with a hammer then inserts them.

Seering criticism

LITTLE has been reported in the Diary about Mostyn McKinsey of

Edinburgh for many a long day.

The amazing man, trend-spotter extraordinaire and pleased to be known

as the Beau Tibbs of the bourses, has been taking stock wisely during

the recession, not merely rebutting the sneers of those who deprecated

his talents when he first encouraged clients and friends to help

themselves to shares in Scottish Power (now well above the original 170p

each and still rising).

Many of the financial fringemeisters, now in Edinburgh in preparation

for the Euro-summit, naturally have been seeking out the company of the

seer of George Street. Only the other day he was encountered,

chaperoning two senior executives of the Bundesbank to golf at

Muirfield. They had heard so much about his prowess and about the

draught gin in the clubhouse there.

Mostyn himself was in amusing, quizzically combative form. Was every

city or town that played host to an EC summit given a dollop of cash by

its own government and by the Communities themselves for tidying up? he

asked.

Lothian region highways department (which he and some of his friends

calculated had ignored potholes so large that they had registered on the

telescopes of Martian astronomers) had apparently gone mad with

activity, drilling up or smoothing down sections of roadway in the city

centre. Perfectly innocent occupants of flats overlooking Holyrood

Palace, or near it, were in trepidation about searches being made under

their beds for SAM missile launchers.

People were being mucked about and not all the promises of increased

trade, hotel room occupancy etc, would compensate, claimed Mostyn, who

was slightly perturbed that Scottish friends of his, visiting the

capital, found themselves being interviewed in hotels for vetting by the

Special Branch. Even the prospect of the Pope canonising the Venerable

Margaret Sinclair (died 1925, a former trade union activist and biscuit

factory worker with McVitie's) might not be a sufficient sop to the

masses, quoth Mostyn.

Clean sweep

GLASGOW'S Lord Provost, Robert Innes, last week presented an award to

Edinburgh.

The major diplomatic initiative was recorded at the opening by BSI

Quality Assurance of its new Scottish Regional Office in Glasgow.

As part of its opening celebrations, BSI QA invited three

organisations to be presented with their recently-gained BS 5750

certificates during the day. Lord Provost Innes was to hand them over

without realising the implications in this for one of the recipients,

the cleansing department of the City of Edinburgh District Council.

However, an Englishman spotted the significance of the presentation.

He was BSI QA's managing director John Ware and he was quick to claim

the diplomatic breakthrough as yet another examnple of the power of BS

5750 accreditation.

For his own part, Derek Richardson, who accepted the certificate on

behalf of the Edinburgh department, gently pointed out to Lord Provost

Innes and the assembled audience how pleased he was that Edinburgh's

cleansing department was the first organisation of that sort in Scotland

to achieve BS 5750 registration.

If he was adroitly hinting (which I'm pretty sure he wasn't) that

Glasgow's bin men should tidy up their act, a few thousand citizens may

say amen to that.

Clean cut

STRATHCLYDE Business Park near Bellshill, which already has a Food

Park, is to get a Medi Park, I gathered the other night at a champagne

reception held by the Morrison Construction Group of Edinburgh. Medi is

a kind of verbal amputation of ''medical'' and it is hoped that it will

be a centre for pharmaceuticals companies, manufacturers of surgical

instruments etc.

Lanarkshire Development Agency has been one of the main hands in

promoting it. Aortech and ATS, two American companies, are already

booked to set up in the park. A new Scottish Company has targeted it,

too.

That was not the reason for Morrison splashing out the champagne. They

were celebrating in Glasgow's wonderful Merchants House the launching of

its book, A Year in Kuwait, by ITN's Sandy Gall, who was there with some

breezy little stories and coloured pictures for his invited audience.

Below the belt

PROVISION of genuinely modern surgical implements may be a crucial

need in Lanarkshire, it comes to mind.

Terry Currie, the Development Agency's director of business

development, is accustomed to hearing pleas to help companies in that

great county, particularly in these recessionary times. Recently, he

received an unusually poetic one from a company boss whose bank manager

was causing him grief. He was even asking how many people were being

sacked.

The last stanza of this mock-Burnsian ode was as follows:

Suffice tae say. he's no' that pleased fur socialist he's no'

Because he's boss, he still insists that four of us must go.

He's through wi' sabre rattlin', past warnings he recalls,

An' the first cut o' his sabre is going tae be my . . .

And thus it continues in that pungent yet lyrical, Lanarkshire patois

that we all know and love so well.