I bought the Telegraph the other day for £1 and, you know what, it was such a rip-roaring read, such a rewarding experience, that I rushed back to the newsagent an hour later and gave the man 15p as a thank you.

I am, of course, joking. I wouldn’t read the Telegraph if you paid me. I also wouldn’t pay more than charged for a newspaper, a book, a house, a haircut, a taxi ride or a meal. And yet, the latter three tend to incur an extra charge over and above the agreed price as standard in the UK. Why?

Most of us are not accountants, most of us do not know the fixed and variable costs of a hairdressers or a taxi firm or a restaurant and are consequently not able to ascertain whether the mullet chop, meter charge or menu price need topped up by 10% or 15% to ensure that the staff get a decent wage and the business can break even. That job, surely, lies with the owner or the manager of the company. Set your prices high enough to make a decent profit and everybody’s happy.

And yet, here I am feeling forced by British society to round up or add on 15% (when did it go up from 10%?) to various bills in order to avoid being a selfish oaf. Indeed, it’s not even society, tips are now added onto bills as standard. Oh, sure, there’s the whole ‘discretionary’ get-out clause that people use but who is going to make a scene and request that the waiter or waitress only puts through the cost of the food and drinks and leaves the tip out…

Me, that’s who!

I’m not ashamed, I’m really not. Be the change you want to see in the world they say? Well, I don’t want the gun of a 15% mark-up put to my head on the rare occasion that I feel flush enough to go out for a pricey meal.

Maybe this is how it starts, the seeping of Tory values into a vulnerable ageing wannabe lefty. It’s the working classes who are counter-intuitively more generous with tipping and buying the Big Issue etc after all. They have a better sense of what it’s like to be in one of life’s trenches I suppose.

If that’s the first thing to go blue then so be it but for as long as I think the NHS should stay public, we should stay in the EU and that income taxes should go up, I ain’t tipping nobody unless they deserve it.

With the gorgeously revamped Scottish National Portrait Gallery just reopening its doors to the public, the end of 2011 sees Scotland with four flagship cultural projects successfully completed. The Scottish Government’s support for culture, given its spending on three of these four projects, should be celebrated, but government must not lose sight of how the arts can truly make a difference amongst all the new bricks and mortar.

Although open to the public from 1 December 2010, the launch of the four great cultural capital projects started officially on 21 January 2011 with Makar Liz Lochhead opening the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. This was followed by the Riverside Museum in June, the National Museum of Scotland in July and rounded off with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery last week.

Scottish Government funding and support, together with fundraising and Heritage Lottery Fund grants, was crucial for three out of the four projects. The National Trust for Scotland received £8.6 million from Scottish Government towards the £21m Robert Burns Museum. The National Museum of Scotland and Scottish National Portrait Gallery, each holding National Collections, received £16m and £7.1m respectively from Scottish Government.

The Riverside was the exception for central government funding, given the collection is held by Culture and Sport Glasgow. The £74m funding for the glorious Zaha Hadid venue was raised from Glasgow City Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund and a fundraising appeal.

Such commitment to culture in a time of austerity indicates the Scottish Government recognises the importance the arts can contribute to both Scotland’s economic and wider wellbeing. And while the economy is still likely to dip further, this has to be a commitment with cannot be cut, either in creating or revamping new venues and also in making sure people can access them after opening.

Arts and culture are central to Scotland’s success as a tourist destination. Unlike festivals and events, museums and galleries can cater for visitors all year round, driving international tourism to us. The return on investment for culture spending is huge: an independent report estimated the reopening of National Museums Scotland’s museum on Chambers Street would contribute £3 to the Scottish economy for every £1 invested by Scottish Government.

And while each of the four capital projects has an essential ‘Scottishness’ as its theme, exhibitions like the stories of wandering adventurers in the National Museum’s World Cultures galleries and the Pakistani tales and faces in ‘Migration Stories’ in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will inspire learning and broaden horizons.

This week also marks a decade since free admission to English national museums was implemented by then Labour Culture Secretary Chris Smith. Over those ten years, even institutions which did not charge previously, like the Tate and the British Museum, have seen a significant rise in visitor numbers since 2001.

The National Museum of Scotland, the Riverside Museum and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery are free for anyone to enjoy, and they must remain that way.  Maurice Davies, Head of Policy at the Museums Association, warned Scottish museums and galleries in 2010 that reintroducing entry charges would be a false economy, because charging admission would slash visitor numbers, thus increasing the level of public expenditure per visitor.

The Scottish Government has already committed more funds to further major Scottish cultural capital projects – the Battle of Bannockburn Visitor Centre, the V&A at Dundee, and revamps of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Each of these future projects are vital, whether for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to have a proper home, or for Dundee to gain some much needed Guggenheim-esque revitalisation on the banks of the Tay. But the Scottish Government must continue to heed the warnings of Maurice Davies and not permit institutions under its auspices, especially those displaying National Collections, to introduce entry charges.

To my secular brain, museums and galleries are what cathedrals were to the medieval mind: glorious living monuments that celebrate the best of humankind in science, or art, or history, or culture. Scotland has some of the world’s greatest collections here, owned by its people. Our government should spend to make sure those collections are housed in the very best of spaces, and it can never forget that its people have every right to see these treasures for free.

The word “community” is widely misused. Nowadays it is taken to mean “any group of people who have a common interest”, from a professional interest in health and safety to a sexual preference to a love of model railways. Local geographical areas are regularly assumed to be communities by definition, even though modern urban social systems tend to work very differently. A friend once described city life as overlapping anarchist villages – you choose your community, and they rarely live next door. I’ve done village life too, and one powerful community value appeared to be a dislike of city folk. So that worked well for me.

But, and I hope you’ll forgive an unusually personal post, the strongest community I know is meeting this weekend. When I was at university in St Andrews a friend there was doing a year abroad from Trinity, a small New England liberal arts college (actually a pretty conservative university, but there we go).

She told me about her support network at home: Cleo Literary Society. It’s not exactly what the name suggests. Until recent memory it was the AX chapter of the national American fraternity network called DKE (pronounced Deke – both Presidents Bush were Deke brothers, incidentally). In the late 1960s it went all anti-Vietnam and very counterculture, and the men decided women should be allowed to join as equal members, including sending a female rep to a national gathering. That’s the kind of thing that tends to mean you have to leave national fraternity networks.

So I went over and joined, a decision which has changed my life and one which rubs up hard against my desire to live a low carbon lifestyle. I was studying anthropology at the time, and when I joined we’d just looked at initiation ceremonies. It’s the only formal ceremony I’ve ever been an active part of (on both sides), and despite a good working knowledge of the effect of liminal periods, it had the bonding effects the ethnographers had described, and I still count many many Cleo siblings as amongst my dearest friends (thank goodness for the internet). It also wasn’t an easy process to go through. As a neophyte you spend more than 72 hours in the hands of the active members, going through a mentally and physically demanding experience, albeit one which doesn’t include any forced intoxication or any hint of the humiliation beloved of many actual fraternities and sororities. I could tell you more, but I would have to kill you, of course.

I spent a day back at the house in September meeting the current crop of kids, and was made to feel instantly more than welcome. And I wasn’t the only “alum” there, or even the oldest – there were four of us, just stopping in for meeting and to say hello. At one initiation I was at back in the 1990s, the oldest member present graduated in 1951, and he told epic tales involving motorbikes and bb guns. The other houses don’t have this effect, typically – people come back a year or two after they graduate, then it all fades away.

Cleo’s a support network, it’s a social structure, it’s a physical space for creative use, and it’s the truest community I know, albeit one with pretty fluid and loose values. The house sifts each year’s intake of new students ruthlessly for the creative, for the idiosyncratic, and ironically for the non-joiners. There are an awful lot of negatives around traditional community – the Royston Vasey effect – but we’ve also lost a lot with the transition to modernity. I’m not advocating initiations for all, of course, and I know others find a similar unity in a platoon or a band or a place of worship, or even in their village, but if it hadn’t been for Cleo I’d never have had it, nor would I have really known what I was missing.

From everyone who wants to be at initiation this weekend and can’t be, to all those that are: we love you.