ALL rise and salute Lord Justice Scott Baker.
Send the man with the wig a ''well done'' card. Ring him up. Invite him round for tea.
In one single judgement he exposed the compensation culture for what it has become — a cheap way for chancers to blag a few bucks.
The case before him concerned a woman who'd broken her leg in a hole left by a maypole on the village green. She wanted a cool £150,000 for her distress and sued the local British Legion who'd put the object up.
The divet had been filled in, and her accident came a whole two years after the maypole had been moved. That's right — two years.
Laughing her claim out of court, the judges said it was ''a proper accident'' and left her with a legal bill for £150,000. Job done your worships.
That phrase — ''a proper accident'' — should be stapled to the desk of every single health and safety manager in the UK. It's the reality check the industry has needed for years.
Mr Health and Mr Safety have turned life into one giant risk assessment. Sorry, but life is a risk and, until the creation of the compo culture, we all understood that.
I fell and did my kneecap in. It took several months to recover, during which time i was advised to sue. Who? The restaurant which chucked cooking oil on the pavement? The street cleaner who didn't mop it up or myself for not looking where I was going?
Co-incidentally, I got this round-robin e-mail which says it all. Read, smile ... and then forward it your health and safety rep. I'm sure they've got a sense of humour. Somewhere.
‘’Congratulations to all the kids who were born in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. We survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.
‘’We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. As children, we sat in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
‘’We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle. No-one actually died! We ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because we were always outside playing!
‘’We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day — and we were okay!
‘’We would spend hours building our go-karts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
‘’We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. We ate worms and mud pies, and the worms did not live in us forever.
‘’We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
‘’Football teams had trials and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
‘’This generation — our generation — produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility ... and we learned how to deal with it all! ‘’

I LOVE going to concerts -- but many aspects of a live show bug me.

Folk who talk throughout the show irritate me, and those who feel the need to yell or whistle half way through a song can be a pain.

But my number one bugbear used to centre around folk who buy pints of beer , drink half of it, and then use the rest as a missile.

That's a speciality of crowds at the SECC -- or at least it is if you take in a rock concert. I presume the fans of Barry Manilow and Shirley Bassey don't compete to see who can create the best trajectory with a half gulped pint of Carling.

But now I've got a new bugbear. Mobile phones which take pictures and record videos.

The days of waving a Zippo in the air are over. Now, no self respecting concert goer can keep his mobile in his pocket the moment the band strikes up the first note of their biggest hit.

Last week at a Ray Lamontagne concert at the Usher Hall I counted over 50 sad souls filming him singing his best known song ''Troub;le.''

Looking down from the cheap seats all I could see were wee white lights at head height; all of them capturing footage which, at best, will be wonky and out of focus and, at worst, turn the singer into a wee black dot surrounded by lots of coloured lights.

We've suddenly created a generation which needs to film everything it sees and store it on a phone the size of a fag packet.

I must be old fashioned. I use my phone to make calls. Don't know how the video thingy works, and the last time I took a pic at a concert and showed it to friends they asked ''what's that splodge.''
That 'splodge' I pointed out, was Bruce Springsteen and his 19-piece Pete Seeger Sessions Singers taken from oh, 200 feet away. and captured forever in a frame measuring roughly 2cms square.

Nope, I think I'll stick with the best video footage of all -- that's the images I see with my eyes and store in my brain.

And they will last a lot longer than anything stored on a mobile.

ROUND about this time of year the call comes. You can set your watch by it.

No sooner do the world darts champoionships get underway than at least one of the national media will call the Press and inquire about Jocky Wilson.

Some head up to town in the hope of an interview, others look for information on his whereabouts.

Every year we tell them he same thing. Jocky's still staying in the same place and no, he won't speak to the media. He hasn't done so in years.

Jocky Wilson remains Scotland's forgotten world champion. Make that twice world champion.

It's sad that no tribute exists to the man who helped put Kirkcaldy on the map in the 1980s.

Darts may not be a spot in the eyes of some snobs -- but show me a piece of sporting drama to top this year's final.

Martin Adams was 6-0 up on Phil Nixon. He needed one more leg to win the crown he had pursued for 14 years. The commentators were talking in terms of an embarrassing whitewash.

Nixon? He started playing like a man without a care in the world. He brokes his duck, and then having lost game after game and leg after leg in the first half, he starts to win them one by one. Six-one became 6-2, then three, then four.

Suddenly it was 6-6 and winner takes all. Then, and only then, does Adams find the double needed to secure a coveted world crown. Shame, I was rooting for Nixon to cap a stnning comeback.

I suspect if Jocky was watching he'd have marvelled at the great darts and criticised the nervy misses.

His own place in the sport's hall of fame is assured -- and it was good to hear his name mentioned as one of the legends.

CLICHES? I avoid 'em like the plague, guv.
The English language is rich beyond calculation, but still we fall back on those old favourites to pad out sentences.
Does anyone truly believe Rome could have been built in a day? If it was then the planning department must have been furious. Has anyone ever proved that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and who has ever seen the silver lining that allegedly hides behind every cloud?
No news is good news? Not to a newspaper editor it isn't. It means we've got space to fill.
It may very well be alright on the night, particularly if we take one step at a time, and leave no stone unturned in rehearsals, but, as we said all along, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Of course we might very well be tempting fate by putting our eggs in one basket, but hey, it won't be the end of the world if it all goes wrong. Needless to say, the grass is always greener, one step at a time, and all that. Que sera, sera ... 
But what's the champion cliche? The daddy of 'em all?
Thanks to a guy called Chris Pash, we now know.
He's an executive with Factiva, a database company that loads news articles from 10,000 sources, including 1,600 American newspapers.  For fun he and his colleagues decided to run a ''worst cliche'' of the month competition and checked the database to see which were used most frequently.
And, at the end of the day, the winner was ... ''at the end of the day.''
According to Bob Baker's newsthinking.com blog, this King of Cliches featured in American newspapers 10,595 times in the first half of 2006. That's 60 appearances per day!

The full text of this article appears in this week's Fife Free Press

Nazareth/Pete Clark, Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline

NAZARETH were the first band I ever saw live.
The venue was the Usher Hall in Edinburgh and it was their No Mean City tour of '79 ... if memory serves me correctly.
That was a good 25 years ago, and they're still going strong.
The weekend brought them back to the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline for the first time since 1973, this time in the company of fiddler Pete Clark, and Robert The Bruce; a truly eclectic line-up.
Clark and Nazareth went acoustic for the first half, re-working many of the band's hits from the 1970s.
There were also solo spots from the Dunfermline fiddler, while the volume was turned up for a full Naz show after the break.
Ear plugs were passed round the more elderly members of the audience - I actually thought Dan McCafferty was kidding about the plugs until I saw one old chap actually hand them out! In truth it wasn't that loud.
With Clark providing support on several numbers, the band rattled through more of their greatest hits, and 35 years on McCafferty's vocals remain as raw and raucuous as ever.
He may be a hopeless dancer but he knows how to belt out a tune!
It was good to hear the old songs once more; ‘This Flight Tonight’, ‘Bad Bad Boy’, and, of course, ‘Love Hurts’ which emerged out of Clark's stirring Scots Wa Hae.
All in all, a good homecoming gig for a band which still tours the world 35 years on.
Proof that old rockers never die, they simply go on tour ... and stay there!

I'VE never been able to keep track of public holidays.
There seems to be absolutely no tie up between bank holidays and local holidays.
Now the Scottish Executive has agreed that St Andrew’s Day should be a national holiday provided it replaces an existing holidays.
The easiest solution would be to simply grant everyone a day off on November 30; or, at least, the nearest Friday/Monday to give us a long-weekend. That, however, won't happen.
While the First Minister is keen to talk up the importance of celebrating Scotland's culture, he isn't too keen on picking up the bill. The Scottish Parliament's Enterprise and Culture Committee calculated that taking an extra day off work would cost the economy as much as £134 million., but those awfi' clever folk added that if it replaced an existing holiday it would cost nowt!
Other countries have many more public holidays – we have an average of eight, the lowest in Euope, while others have up to 15 – so fitting another one into the equation shouldn't be too hard if there is a genuine political desire to do so. Clearly, there isn't. 
The Irish government has pumped millions into St Patrick's Day, and the investment has paid off. In the United States, Thanksgiving gives the retail market a pre-Christmas boost.
Could we achieve the same for St Andrew's Day?
Alex Neil, the committee's convener, said this was ''an opportunity for the parliament to be enterprising and promote Scottish culture.''
The key words are 'opportunity' and 'enterprising.'  If we are a modern, forward thinking country – as Jack McConnell likes to think – then let's come up with a day of celebration to take everyone's breath away.

The full text of this column appears in the Fife Free Press, September 22