WHEN I was a lad in the 1950s in Brock Road in the hamlet of Househillwood, which was an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of Pollok, there was a man called Colin Gemmell who was the street’s banker.

Mr Gemmell was not the banker as in money-lender, but banker as in community activist. Mr Gemmell probably did not know he was a community activist. He organised bus runs for the whole street – down to Saltcoats or Ayr for the weans in the summer; off to Blackpool at the September weekend for the adults.

Mr Gemmell also collected money each week from his neighbours and, with the money saved, hampers of food and drink were delivered for the New Year celebrations. In all Mr Gemmell’s years as the Brock Road banker not a penny went astray.

A wee man with a bunnet and a day job with Glasgow Corporation cleansing department showed financial and organisational skills far beyond those of the board of directors and chief officers of European Home Retail plc. EHR is the company responsible for the Farepak fiasco.

In the Farepak fiasco some 140,000 not very well-off families have lost the £40 million they entrusted to EHR for the provision of Christmas hampers and vouchers. Instead of keeping this money in trust, the company lost its funding through unwise investments in other areas of their business.

I am no expert in matters commercial, but the EHR affair appears to have involved a very careless stewardship of people’s money . It’s as if my aforementioned Mr Gemmell had taken his neighbours’ Ne’erday kitty and gone up to the bookies in Nitshill and put the lot on the favourite in the 3.20 at Wincanton. Which, of course, he never did.

The Farepak investors’ money is now gone as EHR went bust. The 140,000 families are now creditors and will receive little or nothing in return for their investment. They are the subject of pity and charity as sundry guilt-ridden plcs chuck token amounts of money into a Farepak emergency fund.

The Farepak directors and executives are unlikely to face a bleak Christmas. Their salaries have been banked. Their pensions are secure. They have other directorships to be getting on with.

Farepak managing director Nick Gilodi-Johnson, whose father Bob Johnson founded the business, is set to inherit a large chunk of the £75m family fortune.

Sir Clive Thompson, EHR chairman and former head of the CBI, is previously famous as the bloke who urged the government to keep the minimum wage below £3.20 while he was averaging £466 an hour from his various posts and consultancies.

The Farepak fiasco caused much anger among Labour MPs such as Jim Devine, Michael Connarty and Ian McCartney. It was a level of ire our tribunes of the people never managed on the subject of Iraq.

Labour MP Frank Field alleges that Farepak’s bankers, Halifax Bank of Scotland, allowed the company to continue trading “while it clawed back something like £1m of people’s savings to offset the company overdraft with the bank”.

A department of trade investigation will be carried out into the Farepak fiasco. We already know that the EHR directors and executives couldnae run a menage. This is a term of abuse used by us common people to describe individuals who display high levels of financial ineptitude. It’s spelt ménage as in the French word for household but pronounced minodge as (very nearly) in Kylie, the Australian singer.

A ménage was a financial arrangement between individuals, usually women. Each household would contribute a sum every week. The participants would have a turn to spend the money collected in a particular week, the order being drawn by lots. Getting the first week in a ménage-a-vingt was a bit like winning the lottery.

The ménage was an honourable institution. It only worked if everyone kept their part of the agreement. Preservation of honour and dignity meant families in difficult times would do anything rather than renege on their contribution to the ménage.

They would go without food or pawn faither’s suit. They might beg, borrow but probably not steal.

A mother, one of the 140,000 people depriv ed of their Christmas budget by the Farepak fiasco, knows better than to head to Toys’R’Us and shoplift the Nintendo DS console on which her wean Wayne has set his heart. She knows she will end up in Cornton Vale for her trouble.

She’ll certainly get no help from the directors, officers, and bankers of European Home Retail plc, who made £40m of people’s Christmas money disappear . They seem unfettered by any of the community spirit exhibited by Mr Colin Gemmell of Brock Road and any wife and mother who has ever run a minodge.

VICTIMS of the Farepak fiasco will probably not be interested to know that parts of the ill-fated EHR empire which were funded by their money are still trading under new ownership. The EHR directors managed to sell off various marketing and internet subsidiaries for £34m before they went bust.

Only the Farepak bit, with the hamper customers’ money in it, fell prey to the banks and the insolvency practitioners. One of the businesses still operating is called iwantoneofthose.com. The company sells a lot silly things online.

Farepak customers with little spare cash this Christmas are unlikely to be tempted by the fripperies on offer such as the “mini reuseable parachute for flying champagne corks – no more frantic ducking when the bubbly’s a-popping …”

The Farepak Cratchits may find more use for the Grow Your Own Christmas Tree at £2.99, a wise investment for next year. Or The Big Cold Turkey, which, it says on the website, “may sound suspiciously like a Boxing Day lunch, but is in fact a motivational pack to help you kick your nasty habits”. Nasty habits such as trusting such people as European Home Retail plc with your children’s Christmas.

WORKING-class teenagers are to be given finishing lessons to help them compete for better jobs, Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, announced last week. I presume this only applies to England as Scottish children have surely been devolved.

The kids will not be sent to a school in Switzerland where the finishing-off process is normally carried out. They will instead be taken to museums and art galleries and taught interpersonal skills and etiquette (such as eating your mince and tatties with a knife and fork and not a spoon, as I learned in primary one at St Robert’s in 1955).

The finishing lesson has long been a part of Scottish education. I recall a heidie at a junior secondary who advised departing alumni that when they appeared in court, they should wear a smart suit, stand up straight in the dock, and enunciate the word “guilty” without the glottal stop.

DIGGING up your ancestors, archive-wise, is being encouraged as an activity. Ancestor.co.uk is allowing free keeks at the passenger lists of ships which took Scottish emigrants to the Americas over the centuries.

The Mitchell Library in Glasgow welcomes inquiries into its Poor Law records which detail the poverty and suffering of our antecedents. Keepers of such documents and information advise some caution.

They are not kidding. You never know what you might find when you go delving into the familial past. One Aussie of Scottish descent researched the details of his ancestor’s transportation to the colonies. He romantically assumed his forefather had been put on the prison ship in the bay for rebelling against the famine and the crown by stealing Trevelyan’s corn so that the young might see the morn. He was somewhat taken aback to see the documentation showing the reason for the one-way trip to Botany Bay was his progenitor’s penchant for having carnal knowledge of horses.