IT'S ONE of the most gruesome of parenting dilemmas. If one insists on basic good manners from one's own children, does one then insist on similar courtesies from their friends? If little Hamish from down the road does not offer a please or a thank-you when you feed him, and jumps out of the car without as much as a goodbye when you take him home, should you issue a reminder? Or does one simply grit one's teeth and make a mental note - "The richer the parents, the ruder the offspring. Don't ask that little brute back"?

In the absence of The Herald's wonderful Dr Richard Woolfson, who unfortunately could not be in constant attendance when I needed him, I used to agonise about this. Was it my place to discipline others' children? If so, how far should I go? Fair enough to stop them screaming and trashing toys, but was it OK to prompt, in that Norland nannyish way: "And what do you say?"

when they didn't acknowledge you'd put food in front of them?

And - big dilemma this - should one correct a glaring lapse of manners even when the child's parent was present and didn't say anything themselves?

Most worrying of all, I suspected this was a superficial dilemma. This wasn't about the moral rights and wrongs of possessing manners, nor gilding the lily of the dreadful Hamish's long-term future in middle management. It was about how, in the act of correcting, I might be perceived as some bossy, middle-class harridan. It was what it said about me.

Now manners are truly dangerous territory, almost as dangerous as the situation one finds oneself in when someone else's dog is behaving badly (doggy people being twice as touchy as parents about criticism). And there is nothing, repeat nothing, as embarrassing as being caught, when you think the owner isn't looking, giving a vile, yappy, mannerless dog a swift boot up the backside. That's end-of-a-friendship stuff.

I turned for advice to an American friend of mine, an exhippy and a former drug-runner.

A bit of a social liberal in her parenting, I had assumed. Wrong.

"Honey, I just beat it into them, " she drawled. " 'Say please, thank you and thanks for having me, or you can leave my house now'. No manners, and they don't darken my door." As she lit up another joint.

So it was possible to be right on and yet sound like a spokeswoman from the Conservative Family Values Association. I proceeded to get over my embarrassment and spend the next few years demanding basic civilities from small visitors, in as straightforward a way as possible. (As to whether my son has yet recovered from the experience, well, you'll have to get him to take the blanket off his head before he gives an answer. ) Fortunately, officials at Glasgow City Council have come to the same conclusion: that there is no shame, and certainly nothing patronising, about instilling good manners. The innovative nurturing initiative in Glasgow primary schools, introduced as a pilot five years ago to combat indiscipline in the classroom, is expected to be rolled out to 60 more schools in the city. Under the scheme, children are shown how to sit at a table, eat in a group, say please and thank you

and form basic relationships.

The results, in terms of discipline, have already been startling, giving children the tools they need for acceptable social behaviour. These are tools they were not getting at home. Those of us who have a hang-up about correcting manners should learn from this. The ability to say please and thank you is not a badge of class; those who appreciate good manners are not snobs; and manners are not a stick with which to beat the underprivileged.

What we are talking about is a universal language of courtesy and a form of social glue which is, like the ability to cook soup, becoming a forgotten art right across the social spectrum.

Richard Curtis and the edge of reason

It is rare to hear a public speaker, especially in front of a shedload of cynical journalists, sound either vulnerable or sincere. Over the decades that I have attended Press Fund lunches, the bi-annual events to raise money to prop up ruined old hacks, I have been once amazed - by Margaret Thatcher, whom I swear caused a mass sexual frisson when she came in the room - but mostly wearied - by lesser celebrities, most of whom were convinced that if you make jokes about football in Scotland you're on to a winner. But none of the speakers has ever, until now, moved me.

Yesterday the scriptwriter Richard Curtis, a quiet, humorous, modest man, who is a leading light in the Make Poverty History campaign, stood up and appealed to us to make the G8 summit end the inequality which causes 50,000 people to die every day in the developing world. "Eight men in one room will have the power to do something. If we all work on it together, it may just happen, " he said. He was funny, moving and lyrical. He affectionately mocked his celebrity friends (Hugh Grant has no soul; Renee Zellweger is absolutely mad; Geldof is a nightmare and Bono is, by implication, a plonker) and he was close to tears when he spoke of the waste of life in Africa.

Who knows? Might the cynics who patronise Make Poverty History be wrong? Could the power and dignity of Curtis's message actually cause enough people to take to the streets to make the world change, once and for all? It is an exciting thought.

Now, spinmeister, tackle this one

So Alastair Campbell is, farcically, off to the southern hemisphere as the voice of Sir Clive Woodward on the Lions' tour. The spinmeister is a lifelong football fan, and a man one assumed was dedicated to the removal of elitist games such as rugby, and the schools that perpetuate them. Rugby players are too genuine for his dark arts. Plus, he may struggle with the terminology as he rules team communication with an iron rod. Locks and scrums will mean only one thing to Alastair - methods to bully journalists. A spinning pass could only be something he tried on Elinor Goodman at the Christmas lobby party. And, as for that poor sucker of an England player on the Lions' right wing, well, isn't his future short-lived?