A Lady Godiva for Scotland?

THE Adam Smith Institute has calculated that the average Scot will work for the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise until 30 May this year. It was 28 May in 2003. "What about the leap year?" adds our freemarketeer with mischief.

One way the institute suggests commemorating the day that we start to work for ourselves is to find a glamorous woman willing to ride down Princes Street that morning, naked on a white stallion, as a devolved Lady Godiva. "We all remember her lack of clothes, but few remember she was protesting against high taxes," Dr Eamonn Butler of the ASI reminds us.

Godiva was dared to do so by Leofric, the tax collector who was oppressing the populace with heavy taxes and duties. He said he would cut taxation if Godiva would ride naked through Coventry. She did. He did.

"We’ve asked Christine Hamilton, but she would only do it in a body stocking, and her fee was steep. We are hoping to find a Scotswoman willing to score a vivid point off Gordon Brown," adds Dr Butler.

We have to inform the good doctor there are no volunteers at Barclay Towers - yet - but who knows?

• WHILE Rachel Hunter was in Glasgow yesterday, an announcement slipped out almost unnoticed from Hollywood. Her next project will be with a wrinkly old has-been. No, she’s not gone and done a double whammy on Penny Lancaster by both taking over as the Ultimo girl and getting back Rod Stewart. The next step in her illustrious film career will be in Cloud Nine alongside none other than Burt Reynolds. The old goat will play the coach of a women’s volleyball team made up of ex-strippers.

Meanwhile, you have to raise your hat to Michelle Mone, who has given Rachel her most high-profile role this month, even though she is also adorning the cover of Playboy.

• THEY are a nosey lot in Scotland Street. After our piece about the reader who felt they had walked into another novel as Irvine Welsh strolled in the vicinity of "No 44", another resident calls to back up the claim. "Yes, it is true. He was wearing a woolly hat, but his behaviour was definitely non-New Town. He was gobbing in the gutter."

Return to Sandy - and the King in Kinghorn

SOME may have been shaken, rattled and rolled by the news that Elvis was - or rather is? - a Scots-American. But to Diary readers, it is nothing new: we revealed (15 March, 2001) that Elvis was alive and well and living in ... Kinghorn.

A new book may place Elvis’s roots in Aberdeenshire, but our man Sandy Coutts turned down an offer from the National Enquirer three years ago to give us exclusive rights on this snap he took on the Fife Riviera.

Sandy said at the time: "I was taking my pooch along the prom when someone behind me shouted: ‘Ain’t nothing but a hound dog’. I turned around, and there he was at a window. A moment later and he was gone."

Sandy was all shook up, but few would doubt the evidence that it is indeed the King himself.

Meanwhile, the North-east’s claim on the King is nothing new. It has been well kent in football circles ever since the Elgin-born Steven Pressley appeared on the scene a few years ago. Elvis, as he was christened by his imaginative colleagues, maintains the family tradition from Tupelo to Turriff by calling his son Aaron.

But the Diary sticks to the Fife connection, as everyone knows the kingdom is to rock ’n’ roll what Bonnybridge is to UFOs. Why else would Mick Jagger have been spotted by the Diary in Anstruther last year but on a pilgrimage to the Moss Morran Delta?

Then there was our revelation that John Lennon’s inspiration for the Duchess of Kirkcaldy, who appeared in Cry, Baby, Cry on the Beatles’ White Album, came when the Beatles were on tour in Fife in 1963.

All shook up over the loon fae Lonmay

OUR man Michael Mulford reminds us that Aberdeen hosted the Elvis Impersonators World Championships some years ago. They came from all over the globe. Some looked good, some sounded good and some dressed well, but no-one did all three ... until up stepped a loon fae Lonmay called Presley. The audience fell into rapture as he prepared to sing, believing The King was amongst them.

As he got the first chord ready for Blue Suede Shoes, he stepped forward ... then blew it all away: "Well, it’s yin for the money, twae for the show ..."

• IS IT not time, another reader asks, that Robbie Shepherd brought out a tribute album including such classics as: You Ain’t Nothin but a Fitrat, The Wonder of Doos and Suspicious Quines?