Scotland

No blogging here until Monday: it's Calcutta Cup weekend and I'm off to Edinburgh today for the festivities. It's an odd feeling this, the notion that England aren't the obvious and heavy favourites. Two average sides will meet tomorrow and it's quite possible they will produce the worst match of the championship. How grim that would be depends, naturally, on the actual outcome. It can't be any worse than the 1988 fixture which was, quite possibly, the worst game of rugby I've ever attended. Really, we should have a better anthem than Flower of Scotland. It's a pretty rotten and, in some senses, sentimental dirge. Just occasionally, however, it aspires to be something bigger and better than that.

Happily, I couldn't find a photo of Steve Nicol's miss against Uruguay in 1986. Could there be anything dafter, yet still wearisomely predictable, than the news that the polis have warned an Aberdeen shop that dares to sell "Anyone But England" t-shirts* in the run-up to this year's World Cup finals that said items might be considered "racist"? Quiet times in the Granite City, one trusts, if this is how the constabulary is keeping busy. It's inevitable that we'l hear much more on this front as the tournament draws nearer (just ask Andy Murray). So, for the record, this blog's Official England World Cup Position is this: I'd like England to do well but they can do well without actually winning the damn thing.

This is optimism's optimum moment. Twelve hours from now everything will change. That's when, alas, France will most probably begin to take control of this afternoon's encounter with Scotland at Murrayfield. And yet, stubbornly and despite logic that dictates Chris Cusiter's boys have just a one in four chance of prevailing, hope still flowers. That's partly because no-one looked very good today. Beat France and all sorts of things suddenly seem possible. Unlikely? For sure, but this is the time for dreaming. Italy were an affront to rugby and a sad one too; Ireland were pretty poor on Saturday and I still think that David Wallace's best days are behind him (despite his rather strange Man of the Match award yesterday) and that Johnny Sexton is now a better fly-half than Ronan O'Gara.

I should have known that the news was too good to be, you know, true. Turns out that all the excitement about the Unted States dropping its disgraceful ban on the importation of proper haggis is somewhat premature. A spokeswoman from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service emails to "clarify" the matter: Recently, several news articles have incorrectly stated that the U.S. will be relaxing or lifting its ban on Scottish haggis  At this time, haggis is still banned in the U.S. The APHIS rule covers all ruminant imports, which includes haggis.  It is currently being reviewed to incorporate the current risk and latest science related to these regulations.  There is no specific time frame for the completion of this review.

At last, real change we can believe in: the Obama administration is lifting the pernicious ban on haggis that for more than 20 years* has deprived Americans the chance to munch the great chieftain o' the pudden-race. True, during the long, dark years of prohibition some enterprising American butchers stepped into the breach and made versions of the noble creature that attempted to emulate the real thing. While fine as far as they go such enterprises can only go so far. Trying to make haggis without using sheeps' lungs is, in the end, an insuperable problem. All heart but not enough pluck, you might say. So here at least Obama has achieved something that neither his predecessor nor Bill Clinton had the courage to take on.

To return to a subject we considered the other day, it seems there's no end to the mendacity ministers are prepared to endorse if it furthers their efforts to tell everyone how to lead their lives. The latest ploy is to argue that the fact that the average Scot consumes 12.2 litres of pure alcohl every year demonstrates that politicians should be allowed to fix alcohol prices. This figure amounts, we are told, to 46 bottles of vodka a year. Well that doesn't sound all that much, does it? That's a single bottle a week with a dry spell lasting from New Years Day to St Valentines Day. Alternatively, it equates to 11 pints of beer a week. That is, one a day with an extra couple on Fridays and Saturdays. The average Scot, then, can hardly be said to be on the lash all the time.

A reader asks if I might write something about the "ridiculous assertion that alcohol abuse costs every Scot £900 a year". Happy to do so! We all know that if a tobacco company sponsors research no-one in the press will ever call any report produced by that research "independent". Everybody knows that it's only government-commissioned research that counts as "independent". And lo, today's example of this is a report (original PDF linked to here) , paid for by the Scottish government, from "independent experts" at York University claiming that the social and financial costs of booze amount to £900 a year for every Scottish man, woman and child in the country.

Curlers on the Lake of Menteith, Perthshire earlier this week. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images. See, this is the sort of depressing development that makes one lose faith in modern Britain. Hopes had been hight that, for the first time since 1979, conditions would be right for the Grand Match between 2,000 curlers representing the North and South of Scotland to take place on the Lake of Menteith. (It's not simply a matter of the ice being thick enough; there musn't be any snow on the lake either.) And indeed the weather has played its part and in a better, saner world the bonspiel would be going ahead. But that reckons without our health and safety culture.