Mum’s the word
MODERN-DAY parenting continued. A Renfrewshire reader emails: “My five-year-old daughter has threatened not to talk to me for the rest of the day. I’m a quarter offended, and three-quarters wishing she sticks to her word.”

Pulling her chain
GLASGOW Lord Provost Sadie Docherty is giving up her post come the council elections next month. During her five years in office she has been a guest at hundreds of events but we always liked the tale of her attending a fundraising sporting dinner for the Beatson at Glasgow’s Hilton Hotel, wearing her chain of office, where former boxing champ Frank Bruno referred to her as “the madam here with the bling”.

Cutting remark
WE’VE mentioned the tourists who are now appearing in Scotland as the sun begins to shine. John Rose in Fort William tells us a tourist strolled into Marshall and Pearson’s ironmongers in the town and asked if they cut house keys. When the assistant said they did, she said she would like two copies, and just stood there. When the assistant asked: “Have you got the key with you?” she replied: “No. D o I need to?”

A sore one
WHITECHAPEL Gallery in London is holding a retrospective of Scottish sculptor and artist Eduardo Paolozzi. We somehow remember before his death that Eduardo was at a dinner in Edinburgh when then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott casually asked him: “When did you get into sculpture?’’
 “When,’’ Sir Eduardo replied, before “Two Jags” ignored him for the rest of the evening, “will you be getting into politics?’’ 
So concerned
WHAT young folk see as essentials – Barry Wilson in Paisley tells us: “I was talking to my girlfriend’s five-year-old niece via Skype, on my computer, since she is in Mongolia, and I told her I did not have a mobile phone, or an iPad, or a television. I watched her consider this shocking information, before asking in a concerned tone, ‘Do you have food?’”

Murder on the dance floor
AN AYRSHIRE golfer tells us he asked a fellow player at his club how he had enjoyed a wedding he had been invited to. He replied: “You don’t fully know your own strength until someone tries to pull you on to a dance floor against your will.”

Petty potty trick
ANOTHER slice of the complex world of marital life as a reader in Glasgow hears a chap in his local declare: “I don’t just put the seat down, I put the lid down as well. If I have to work to pee, then so does she.”
 
The cheek of it
A READER in Glasgow heard the woman at the next table to him in a coffee shop tell her pals: “The next time someone tells me to expect the unexpected, I’m going to slap them on the face, and ask them if they expected that.”

A tilt at the tint
SIMPLE pleasures. A Hyndland reader tells us that when she sees some huge car with tinted windows obscuring the driver she simply waves at them in the hope that they worry about the tint wearing off.