IT may have escaped the notice of some of our readers that an election looms over us.

LOCAL quizmaster Brendan Curran - the self-styled Craig Dunain - was driving up the A9 one night last week through a snowstorm and found poor radio reception.

AS some of you will have noticed, Burns' Night has just passed, Monday to be precise, causing massive shortages of haggis as well as rising prices for neeps and tatties throughout the area.

LET'S try to avoid talking about snow this week. We can all take a joke, but sometimes it just goes too far.

IN days gone by the Foolscap column used to run a problem page. The more cynical reader or editor might suggest that we continue to do so.

HOW democracy works or does it?

WE are surrounded by mountains and moorland here in Strathspey. Vast empty tracts of wilderness.

THE Foolscap team member of greater maturity is on holiday this week.

WE two often sit up here overlooking Grantown and consider matters of great pith and moment.

ONE of our moles decided that, with the summer well and truly upon him, it was about time he ventured out from the safety of his tunnel and did something more exciting.

AS a major influence on local culture, this column promotes the arts as fast as it can, so it is never a surprise when another poetic masterpiece hits our desk.

AMERICANS are great. They gave us the George Foreman grill, and the coffee pot, and blue jeans.

IT'S NOT often that we two are allowed out of the office these days – what with the recession biting hard, our once generous editor has tightened the purse strings to such an extent that he squeaks when he walks.

DUE TO the impoverished state of your two heroes up here in the window on the world, or at least that portion of the world that infests Grantown, we have been back once more on highland freecycle groups.yahoo.com/group/inverness_freecycle the recycling web site where freebies can be had for the cost of going to collect them.

WALES was in a state of excitement last week as they opened a new café atop Mount Snowdon.

NEWS COMES from Aviemore’s much-travelled ex-Provost, Ian Malcolm, which in itself raises another problem. What do we call an ex-Provost who wasn’t a Provost in the first place?

Current news items have spawned an increase in poetry around the Strath and this column never shies from bringing culture to the masses.

TWO of the most important things in the life of a good newspaperman are a penchant for accuracy and the ability to maintain robust relationships with useful politicians.

OUR colleague Charlie Whelan, who has an office somewhere down in the basement as befits a former spin doctor, has come in for some stick.

AVID readers of this column will recall the Darwin awards for those people who have selflessly removed themselves from the gene pool due to their own stupidity but it seems what we call the 'Nanny State’ is keen to ensure that the stupidest among us can still survive in spite of our shortcomings.

IT WOULD appear that the credit crunch is not only hitting the man in the street. It seems that rock stars and pop singers have no immunity to the plunging economy, either, and are turning to increasingly innovative ways to save money.

LOCAL recycling specialist company David Ritchie & Sons Ltd has been in business for 50 years this year and the company decided to celebrate with a dinner dance this week for two hundred of their colleagues, friends, and business partners.

BACK in the spring of the year, when the weather was bright and warm (When was that? – Ed), fans of the BBC's 'Springwatch' will have been aware that filming for the series was taking place all over the area.

DOWN on the ground floor of Strathy Tower our advertising department works away day in day out under the eagle eye of our very own blonde bombshell and chief advertising executive, Jacqui O'Rourke.

BRAND – "a particular class of goods". Despite the credit crunch or perhaps as a result of it, we two on the Foolscap newsdesk have been ever busy seeking out opinion on the economic events as they unfold.

MANY people in this particular airt would earnestly like to appear in 'Foolscap', or at least so we are led to believe.

THE Showboaters, Boat of Garten's answer to Britain's Got Talent – except that Showboaters actually have some talent – are planning their next production, their own version of 'The Steamie'.

OCCASIONALLY your two hunky Lotharios on the 10th floor get out for a bit of exercise to keep ourselves trim and ensure that we remain in constant demand so we were of course at the front of the queue when the doors opened at the health and fitness fayre at the Craig MacLean Centre when there were loads of things to do including alternative therapies, spinning classes, mini Olympics, and even raffles.

AS usual, we travel the length and breadth of the country to bring you stories of pith and moment to educate, entertain and enlighten the readers of the 'Strathy'.

OUR most assiduous readers may recall Angus MacNeill's photo from the States with the curious sign "PED X-ING" which the great brains on the 10th floor eventually deciphered to mean pedestrian crossing.

WE two here on the 10th floor were whiling away the time one afternoon earlier this week, playing wallet top trumps as it happens, when an alarming story was passed to us by one of our editorial team.

THINGS have been eerily quiet on the 10th floor of Strathy Towers for the past couple of weeks – just we two in our lofty perch, tip tapping away on the keyboards, determined to beat the infernal computers at online bridge sometime soon.

IN our earnest way we seek to educate and illuminate our readers and so we have to inform those less well travelled that it is possible to visit the Speyside Way without coming to Scotland.

AVIEMORE will be bracing itself again this weekend for the annual influx of scary monsters and black-haired, white-faced ageing Cure fans. Yes, morbid music fans, it's upon us again, the Aviemore Goth Weekend.

THE greats of the ski trade, not to mention the tycoons of local business, turned out on Friday in their hundreds for the funeral in Nethy Bridge of that doyen of Scottish skiing, Sandy Caird.

THE people of Grantown are to be found these days huddling in corners talking in whispers from the corners of their mouths.

WITH the ever deepening fuel crisis starting to take a grip in the strath, we two on the 10th floor have been scouring the Internet looking for cheap horses.

NOT only do the Foolscap duo run a local news desk on the fifth floor, we also have an international affairs desk and, unknown to almost everyone, including our own fine editor, a vibrant and well connected sports desk.

THOSE of us who are obliged to travel up and down the A9 – just to check the whereabouts of the Cairngorms National Park signs – will be getting somewhat exasperated by the continual one-way systems which have operated almost non-stop over the last few years.

THEY say the Foolscap team never sleeps, merely rests and waits on the next story to come along. They say we rarely eat – surviving on small but frequent sips of potent tonic delivered from bottles barely disguised by brown paper bags.

OUR story of Hendy Pollock's disappointment at a fast food outlet in Perth has brought forth another story to remind us that while he may be a star of Speysound FM, he isn't necessarily a gourmet.

THE ever popular local MC and DJ Hendy Pollock travels the countryside to while away his retirement, and so recently found himself feeling peckish at a well known burger joint in the town of Perth.

WE two here in the rarefied atmosphere of the 10th floor of Strathy Towers are used to getting our own way, and can on occasion have the strangest of whims.

CAIRNGORM Mountain has enjoyed some wonderful ski conditions over the last month, and has probably had more ski days already than in the whole of last season.

WELCOME to the glad New Year 2008. No doubt you are hoping that this year will be the big one: that elusive year that brings non-stop success, continual fun and the admiration of all your friends.

NO DOUBT you are all full of food and sitting reading this in that heady post-Christmas atmosphere redolent with the scents of turkey and sprouts.

THE most diabolic thing about sagas is that they do tend to go on and on, always keeping one hanging on just a bit longer in the hope of an outcome.

FOLLOWING our recent story about the owner of the Cairn Hotel in Carrbridge, and his problems with the Raigmore Hospital phones it seems that this douce village at the north end of the Strath has more than its fair share of technologically challenged dinosaurs.

RETIRED GP of this parish, Angus MacNeill, has recently returned from a trip across the Atlantic, and is impressed by the ability of our colonial cousins when it comes to naming streets, roads and avenues, as the photo below shows.

NEVER a column to jump on a bandwagon or to harp on about the same old story (Oh yeah? – Ed), nonetheless on a recent trip through Aviemore we have to mention our surprise and consternation on reaching the now completed roundabout at what we used to call the ski road but now feel should be given a more accurate name.

IT HAD been a quiet fortnight around the Strath in terms of news, and we here on the 10th floor were slowly losing the will to even bask in the Jacuzzi, instead preferring to slope around the office bemoaning the lack of original characters these days.

SUMMER slips into autumn, the leaves turn to a golden hue and a melancholy air settles over the Foolscap office.

PETE Carson, flamboyant Speyside Radio DJ, was spinning the discs with gusto last week when he found himself in a bit of a tight situation.

THE GOOD people of Laggan are up in arms at the moment. Apparently their drinking water supply is of such a poor quality that they are unable to drink, bath or even shower in it.

IT'S all happening in Nethy Bridge, man. Or it at least it will be if the hip and groovy residents' wishes come true and Mr Bob (master of free love and all things 'out there') Dylan, buys the Heatherbrae Hotel.

THEY say that if you stand in the same place for long enough, all of life will pass you by, or at least they say something along those lines.

SOME of our more intellectual readers recently visited the Pitlochry Festival Theatre to soak themselves in the arts, and jumped to the conclusion that the housing crisis in Pitlochry may be worse than our own.

A GOOD memory is a blessing, and a selective memory an absolute asset.

THE 'Outsider' Festival at Rothiemurchus was deemed to be a great success by most of the crowd attending in spite of the weather which, as many of you must have noticed, was dire, verging on the appalling.

THE great music festival, Rock Ness, has by all accounts been a great success bringing some of the world's biggest names in electronic, dance and rock music.

THIS was sent to us by an upside down mole in Australia. It seems the Oz Government have opened a website “The National Public Toilet Map” www.toiletmap.gov.au

THIS column doesn't like to swank, but you may recall that we suggested that the complexities of the voting forms would result in a huge number of spoiled papers.

OUR gorgeous pouting editor, Gavin Musgrove, moves in elevated circles in the higher echelons of society.

UP HERE in our 10th floor eyrie overlooking Grantown we notice the arrival of Spring and consider the more pleasant weather conditions prevailing as we clatter away at our word processors, processing words like the very devil.

WE note from last week's blatt that the chief executive of Highland Council, Arthur McCourt, has announced his retirement and is in line for something of a windfall.

MACDONALD Hotels top salesman Gerry Gethin (he sells lots of tops) is back in the news yet again.

LOCAL transport supremo Maggie Lawson, who runs the Badenoch and Strathspey Community Transport Scheme and advises on all things to do with transport, may not be just as efficient where her own transport needs are concerned.

IF you remembered that today is St Valentine’s Day, lucky you.

WELL, the more experienced of the Foolscap team is on holiday this week, strutting his stuff on the ski slopes and no doubt taking full advantage of the hospitality opportunities.

THE strath's residents are not just bucolic sons of the old sod or easy-going refugees from the hurly-burly of city life. We have among us many exciting and dynamic people who travel the world in search of adventure.

GREETINGS to all our readers, coupled with the earnest hope that 2007 proves to be more rewarding than all previous years to date so far.

THE bolder of our readers who searched through the 'Strathy' two weeks ago to find this column may have eventually managed to find us somewhere near the back.

OUR roving French correspondent George "Call me Georges" Anderson, late of Newtonmore, has been touring the continent on our behalf and it seems is getting delusions of adequacy in terms of his apparent desirability and aspires to be one of the HotScots that we mentioned some weeks ago in this column.

BANNER headlines in last week's edition of this blatt announce the unpopularity of the concept of a Tourist Tax in the Highland region suggested in the Burt Report.

THE highly paid brains at VisitScotland have come up with yet another campaign to boost tourism and they are looking for eligible Highland men who think they’ve got what it takes to attract single women from all over the world.

We on here on the 10th floor are renowned for our sporting prowess and athleticism, we know how to enjoy sport both as spectators and as competitors, and are often to be found at events fully entering into the spirit of things.

HIGHLAND Council held the official opening of the new Kingussie library two weeks ago.

TONY BROWN, well-known entrepreneur and creator of the local tome of wisdom, i-park, is a fairly well travelled man.

CARRBRIDGE’S Virgin V cosmetics rep, Mary Grant aka 'Virgin Mary,’ has been one of the stars of the company winning all sorts of exotic prizes including a recent trip to New York which, it has to be said, rather took the normally resilient New Yorkers completely by surprise.

AFTER what seems like years of careful thought and deliberation, the RSPB have finally concurred with the British Ornithological Union and admitted that the Celtic crossbill is a distinct species. Why the about-turn?

UP here in the rarefied atmosphere of the 10th floor we have, over the years, enjoyed the envy of the population for the sumptuous suite of offices that the Foolscap team inhabit near the top of Strathy Tower.

AS SOON as the good weather comes along we start to get a bit hungry for the road up here on the 10th floor.

IDLY sipping chilled champagne from the third bottle in the case while sitting in our luxury Jacuzzi on the 10th floor I pass the time by checking last week’s edition of this blatt.

OUR FAVOURITE bouncing Czech has inadvertently managed to work his way into this column yet again.

AFTER our recent suggestion that we Scots support our neighbours, England, in the World Cup a number of people have come up with suggestions, none of which is suitable for a family newspaper such as this.

WE HERE on the 10th floor like to keep ourselves at the peak of physical fitness, spending up to an hour each week in the gym pumping iron and generally working out. Our torsos gleam with sweat and women swoon at the sight of us.

MARK Harvie, who has to go through life bearing the burden of being Speysound presenter Fred Neck's son-in-law, has a further hurdle in his race through life as we know it.