IT’S almost time for the last supper. Though not quite. Another 24 hours will have to pass before the concluding morsel is munched, the final nibble on the edge of no more. After that, a little part of Scotland’s living history will die.

IT’S been an up and down sort of day for Imran Akhtar. And in a much too literal sense, as far as he’s concerned. First, he had to clamber on top of the roof of the Ottoman Coffee House on Glasgow’s Berkeley Street, to make sure the temporary tarpaulin was still in place and keeping out the wind, rain, hail and snow. (It’s been one of those typical Scottish afternoons, with the weather behaving like a plump maiden aunt’s two-layered chocolate box. In other words, way too many delights

Zinfandel Gastro Bar

Temaki

Thyme: Lebanese Street Sajeria

Inexpensive tablets can make great ebook readers, video players, or web browsers, and some of our top picks are well below the $100 mark. Here's how to find the right balance of price and features.

Amazon still has some nice deals right now on Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets — up to $30 off, plus $5 in ebook credits on select purchases, and 3 months of Kindle Unlimited for $0.99.

If you need a last-minute gift, you can grab a $50 Apple iTunes gift card for $42.50. Plus, you can save $250 on the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 and $100 on the iRobot Roomba 675.

5G tablets are on the way, and Samsung's Galaxy Tab S6 could be repackaged as one of the first. The South Korean company accidentally listed the 5G-ready model on its website. Now, it's only a matter of time before the Galaxy Tab S6 5G goes official.

Organize your phone, tablet, and computer with these quick and easy tips from productivity expert Jill Duffy. Investing just a little time here at the beginning of the year could make a big difference for all of 2020.

The 2019 iPad mini with Wi-Fi and 256GB of storage normally sells for $549, but is available on Amazon right now for just $519. That's the lowest it's ever been on the site.

The latest iPad Pro featuring 1TB of storage and cellular connectivity is on sale at Amazon for just $1,299.99. Models with less storage and just Wi-Fi are also marked down.

For a limited time, the 7-inch Fire 7 Kids Edition is $40 off while the 8- and 10-inch models are both $50 off. These tablets make a great gift for 3-to-12-year olds.

The popular Roomba 675 is just $199 today, the 8-inch Amazon Fire HD 8 is only $50, and the 2TB Crucial MX500 2.5-inch SSD is back on sale for $200.

The 10.2-inch Apple iPad with 128GB of storage is $100 off, a 65-inch Vizio 4K TV is $500 off and includes a $250 Dell gift card, and you can score the first discount on Echo Buds.

The cartridge was meant to upgrade the processor and GPU in the Surface Hub 2S so as to allow rotation and multiple hubs to work together.

Strife of Brian

IT’S strange the different things people took away from Theresa May’s teary goodbye in Downing Street yesterday.

LIKE Nicola Sturgeon, I blame the Tories. Not, like her, for everything everywhere, but for an off-key outing at FMQs.

Flat out

THE last day of term before recess saw MSPs attempt more jokes than usual at FMQs, some of them even bordering on approaching the mildly funny. Heady days.

Rocket man

WELL that didn’t take long. Scotland’s latest experiment in direct democracy was all but killed off this week, barely two months after Nicola Sturgeon announced it.

Obi-Moran Kenobi

WHAT a difference a Prime Minister makes. There used to be a time, back before it wasn’t an obstacle to promotion, that Jackson Carlaw was aghast at the idea of a no-deal Brexit.

Uniformly bad

The American politician John Nance Garner is better remembered for something he said rather than anything he did as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president.

In “Painting Nationalism Red?”, an engaging new pamphlet published by Democratic Left Scotland, the journalist Neal Ascherson pays tribute to Tom Nairn as Scotland’s “pre-eminent political intellectual”.

Shortly before the second general election of 1974, the late John P Mackintosh attempted to explain the rise of the Scottish National Party to a predominantly left-wing (and English) audience in an essay for the New Statesman.

A few days after a majority of Britons backed Brexit in June 2016, this newspaper reported that Nicola Sturgeon had been in talks with London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo.

The Scottish Labour Party, I think it’s fair to say, hasn’t had a good decade.

“Scotland”, declared a young Alex Salmond in May 1975, “knows from bitter experience what treatment is in store for a powerless region of a common market.”

In his new book, “The End of British Party Politics?”, the political scientist Roger Awan-Scully captures the paradox of last year’s general election in Scotland.

The sight of Scottish ministers boarding flights to far-flung destinations in order to “sell Scotland to the world” has been a familiar one for more than half a century.

Today in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister will explain her decision to authorise airstrikes against Syria alongside France and the United States.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an “in conversation” event with the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild at Harvard University.

What do professional golfers do in this coronavirus-induced hiatus?

Scotland’s golf courses have been urged to close in the wake of the Government’s latest measures to combat the coronavirus.

In this country, where the dank, grim days of winter are as short as a resigned sigh, the onset of some decent, dry spring weather doesn’t half raise the morale. Well, it would if the coronavirus wasn’t lurking all over the parish.

It wasn’t that long ago that health experts were championing golf as a soothing, morale-boosting haven away from the ravaging rigours of the coronavirus.

It was 50 years ago this week that one of the greatest golfers ever to grace the greens set out on his quest to win his first US Masters championship.

To say that amateur golf in Scotland has been slow to adapt to change is putting it kindly. But where the rise of the nomads, the Equality Act, the credit crunch and repeated faltering reform efforts have failed, perhaps Covid-19 will finally be the shock that thrusts the sector into a meaningful if seriously belated overhaul.

THE Open Championship will not take place at all this year.

Scottish Golf today revealed that no date has been set for the sport in this country to restart and stressed that lockdown restrictions will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

IF you’re under 40, or as I like to call it these days, "pre-arthritis", you probably won’t remember the dark days of malbec when you had a 50-50 chance of opening something that would be as rough as sandpaper.

Chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association Karen Betts explains why she thinks the Scottish 'water of life' is so special.

CHRISTMAS is coming, the goose is getting fat and there's no wine as flexible with the varied foods of the season than rioja, so let’s take a seasonal look at our favourite Spaniard.

WELL, here we go again, folks. It’s time to take a look at the perfect wines for Christmas so sit back, relax and let’s go down the rabbit hole together.

IF you’re anything like me, these weird alcohol-free January fads are to be avoided so let's raise a glass to a guilt-free month and kick it off with a look at something clean and refreshing to wash the season of excess away.

IT only seems like yesterday that we were in the season to be jolly and, all of a sudden, romance is in the air. Before we know it, we’ll all be rolling eggs down a hill but, in the meantime, I guess we should take a look at rose, the wines of love.