Iain Maciver writes …

WHEN a generous road builder from Tong offers you a piece of cake and says he made it himself, you cannot help but wonder not only what is in it but also how he made it.

No reason for my doubts other than the fact that being able to drive a digger or wield a shovel does not necessarily give you a flair for delicately popping a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda or even shovelling 140 grams of muscovado sugar into a mixing bowl.

That’s prejudice. Someone’s occupation should be no disqualification. So I accepted the exceedingly kind offer in the Carlton by Murdo Farquhar of a wedge of his banana loaf cake. What a revelation. It was the tastiest, finest, moistest, yummiest banana loaf that I ever had the pleasure of placing on my primary deglutition organ. That’s my tongue, in case you’re wondering.

I know because I have had many banana loaf thingies. I have nibbled at some of the very finest – ones made by Nigella Lawson.

Before she became a domestic goddess, Nigel Lawson’s big girl sat opposite me at a London newspaper and, yes, she was always bringing in snacks.

A former colleague

It would be sun-dried vine tomatoes with shavings of Peruvian goat’s cheese, then fine slivers of roasted yak shoulder drizzled with a jus distilled from drops of dew from 1,000 Tibetan mornings.

It was a two-way thing, of course. When it was my turn, Nigella always got half my prawn sandwich, drizzled with a subtle mayonnaise and ketchup mixture from the mist-shrouded slopes of Kensington High Street.

Sadly, her loaf was always a tad dry. It fell apart and the entire aromatic affair would end up in my lap. Even then she was not wanting in handy domestic skills and noting my discomfiture she would bound over to help me retrieve every last crumb from every last fold of my upper-trouser.

Remarkable woman. Cold hands though.

She is now married to Charles Saatchi, the art collector. But why? He has been described as unsociable, grumpy and always on a diet. Crikey, if I had known that was what she was looking for it could all have been so very different for the both of us. Obviously, I did not drop enough banana loaf or deep-fried duck-billed eel down my front. Mind you, I have been dropping everything else over myself since, as the present Mrs Maciver testifies with unnecessary regularity.

Sir Thomas Beecham said we should try everything once except folk dancing and tickling our relatives, or words to that effect. How else can we know whether we will like something if we do not actually give it a whirl at least once?

There is a tip here for the Rev George Hargreaves of the Scottish Christian Party. They are putting up a no-Sunday-ferries candidate at the next election.

But then there are the other lot who are also doing that so neither will have a snowball’s chance. If he really wants to get into Western Isles politics, I think the writer of So Macho should cosy up to the islands’ Labour Party. The branch is looking for a chairman with a profile after Callum Ian MacMillan decided to, er, seek alternative challenges. Mr Hargreaves certainly has a profile. Two years as Labour chairman and he could then be the candidate. Go on, you know you want to.

And what better challenge for Mr MacMillan than jump on board the Scottish Christian Party? You may like it, CI.

Thankfully, there are people with an adventurous side to their character. People who will try just about anything, sometimes just so that they can say they at least tried it. Sometimes though, you have to be careful who you tell.

Take Morag Macdonald of Mire ri Mor, the grand diva of morning Gaelic radio. A few weeks ago, I am reliably informed, Mor mentioned how they passed the time at least once when she was a young girl.

Apparently, and I didn’t hear it myself but I have the most reliable informants in Ishbel and Jessie from Ness, she let slip that she and these other fine upstanding young ladies who were her contemporaries liked nothing better than smoking dodgy substances.

Morag? Our Mor? The Mire Mor? No way.

To say I was somewhat shocked is a bit like saying the Sabbatarians are somewhat against Sunday ferries. To look at her now you would think Mor was the very model of elegant propriety and charm. Yet lurking beneath that serene, matronly exterior is . . . a what, a junkie?

The shameless hussy that she is, she went into great detail about what they got up to in the cycle sheds, or whatever their foul den was. As the courts have sadly heard so very often, the procedure involved colourful, exotic and costly vegetation from lands far away. I mean, have you seen the price of bananas?

Yes, indeed, the modus operandus, the listeners learned as Mor made a clean breast of her mis-spent youth, was that these naughty pals scraped the white fibrous layer from inside the skin of these bananas, dried it out, stuck it on to a Rizla paper and took to vigorous sucking. It was not illegal, we are assured.

To this day, apparently, these now-refined ladies claim it was all based on an unfounded rumour circulating among Mor and her contemporaries about the properties of dried and singed nanas and that it did absolutely nothing for them – or to them.

I am really not so sure, you know. The effects of that kind of thing could be long term. They may take decades to manifest themselves. We are watching and listening very carefully to Mire.

And shock, horror; this did not actually happen on Uist. The smoking of the yellow fellow incident occurred on the mainland while the lady in question was staying in the school hostel.

Does this mean Morag was a herbaceous boarder?