Wordsmith with Martin Smith

Please say it isn't true.

Tell me that Kate McCann had nothing to do with her daughter Madeleine's disappearance.

The news that she is being treated as a suspect is almost as bad as the news that Madeleine had gone missing.

Surely she couldn't have had anything to do with her disappearance and then put this act on for three months?

Apparently traces of Madelaine's blood have been found in a Renault car the family hired 25 days after she was reported missing.

How could they have moved her without the world knowing about it with hundreds of reporters following their every move?

It can't be true.

It seems utterly implausible and too horrible, too devastating for the rest of the world for our faith, trust and sympathies to be so utterly misplaced.

Doesn't it?

Scary cheeks for the bagpiper in Fargate

THE buskers and street musicians were out in number on Fargate yesterday.

African singers, native American dancers, Peruvian pipers and a trumpeter who looks a little like he's miming.

All very colourful and to the betterment of the area on a beautiful late summer's day.

I just can't help thinking though that the bagpiper Suart Maclaughlan whose blowing action has to be seen to be believed, would have been too much for me as a kid.

Fine though his piping is, the way his cheeks and neck expand after years of high pressure blowing stretches the neck and face muscles - like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and many other blowers before him - his cheeks look pretty scary.

I guess it doesn't hurt him but it looks like it should.