Scottish wit wasn’t to the taste of novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp

FOR reasons too bothersome to explain I have become mildly obsessed with Alan Sharp, novelist and screenwriter, who died earlier this year. Famously, Mr Sharp wrote the first two novels – A Green Tree in Gedde and The Wind Shifts – in a projected trilogy, both of which feature a chap called John Moseby who hails from Greenock. After their author found fame and fortune in Hollywood he turned his back on fiction – and Greenock – and showed no inclination to complete his project.

Now, however, I am indebted to my dear friend William Boyd, writer extraordinaire, who points out that in Mr Sharp’s movie, Night Moves, the character played by Gene Hackman is also called Moseby, leading Mr Boyd to wonder if his creator may have seen this as the missing part of the trilogy. Could be.

Meanwhile, I am also indebted to Malcolm Baird, whose father invented television, for sight of a review Mr Sharp wrote back in the day on a book about Glasgow. He was unimpressed, largely because its author overlooked Glaswegians’ penchant for sick jokes.

One such was about Peter Manuel, the serial killer, who, it was said, could have pleaded insanity – which would have saved him from the gallows – because when the polis picked him up he had a Third Lanark season ticket in his pocket. Boom, boom!

IT is 20 years – give or take a few months – since Nelson Mandela came to Glasgow to receive the Freedom of the City, which he had been given 12 years previously when he was still in prison. It was one of the city’s finest moments.

Mr Mandela c hose to vi s i t Glasgow because, as he acknowledged, its people “were the first in the world to confer on me the Freedom of the City at a time when I and my comrades in the ANC were imprisoned on Robben I sl and serving l i f e sentences which, in apartheid South Africa, then meant imprisonment until death.”

It was a joyous occasion, commemmorated by Ian Davison, folk singer er extraordinaire, in his exuberant nt song Mandela Danced which, when en the great man finally does depart, t, I trust will be played at deafening ng volume in George Square where re he himself once jigged in front of a 10,000-strong crowd.

EMERGING from the ancestral pile, I spy lying in the street what looks like a pair of conjoined crows. On closer inspection I see nothing that could be described as crow-like.

Rather there’s an item of clothing which someone may have dropped. Ever the altruist, I stoop to pick it and put it on a wall from where it may be retrieved by its owner. In so doing I discover that what I have in my hand is a bra which is black on the outside and purple on the inside. Kinky or what.

Even I – no expert in such matters – can see that it is large, perhaps even extra large, and padded, like a cell. While I am taking all this in, and wondering how the bra got into the gutter – discarded by a feminist? torn off in a moment of passion by a Ladies’ Day racegoer? – a dogwalking neighbour strolls past, nods knowingly and goes on his