Got a knock-back
BIT of a farce in Aberdeenshire when Prime Minister Theresa May knocked on a few doors and got no reply.
Our local contact Gordon Casely explains: “When she started door-knocking in Banchory, she had arrived in a road well filled with pensioners just at the time the evening paper is delivered. ‘Ah, that’ll be the paper, then’ would have been the reaction in the households.”

Flushed with success
OUR recent school stories remind Amy Kinnaird: “Years ago there were three boys called John in the primary class I taught.
“One afternoon, as I brought the lines in after lunch-time, I noticed one John was missing. I asked his pal, another John where he was and was told the toilet.
“After the class settled I realised that he was still not in the room and I sent his pal to see what was wrong.
“After a few minutes the classroom door was dramatically thrown open, nearly hitting the wall, and John announced to myself and the whole class, ‘He’s OK, Mrs Kinnaird. He’s just doing a jobbie. I heard a plop’.The class erupted.”
 
An inside job
STREET traders continued as Brian Chrystal recalls: “ I remember a trader at the Barras loudly flogging off assorted sizes of net curtaining.
He held up one piece, which he described as ‘just the job for the bathroom windae’, before turning to a group of female spectators and asking, ‘Come on ladies – ony of youse got an inside toilet?’”

Bank on it
HOW did you spend the bank holiday? A reader sadly emails: “Lie in for another hour. Move to couch. Eat snacks. Procrastinate. Wonder where day has gone. Sigh.”

Storming tale
WE mentioned bad parenting techniques and a Stirling reader tells us: “My son is petrified of thunder. I told him that was ridiculous – it’s the lightning that will kill you not the thunder.”

Using your loaf
GOOD to see the Airdrie bakery being allowed to reopen after fears it could have been linked to an outbreak of  hepatitis.
It somehow reminds us of the reader, who heard a woman in a Greenock bakery ask for a loaf of brown bread, but telling the chap at the counter: “I’m buying it for a visitor who is a broon breadie type.
“I prefer white. But as ma faither used to say, ‘The whiter the breid, the sooner you’re deid’.”

How many steps away?
OUR story about locals referring to Ecclefechan as ’Fechan reminds Brian Logan: “I once stayed at the Greenmantle Hotel in Broughton.
Knowing there was a John Buchan Centre in the town, I asked a pedestrian on the Main Street if he knew where the Buchan Centre was.
He replied, ‘I don’t Buchan know’.”

A grain of truth?
TODAY’S piece of whimsy comes from Mike Ginn, who says: “Most bags of sand live a tough life stopping floods.
“But some, the lucky ones, live a leisurely life tied to the basked of a hot air balloon.”