Plain sale

A NEWTON Mearns reader tells us he bumped into an old chum at the local shopping centre and asked if he had sold his house as he and his wife had been talking about moving. “Oh, we decided to stay put,” his pal replied, and when our reader asked him why, he said: “Well, we did get in an estate agent but when we read the glowing description he had drawn up for our house we realised it was exactly the place we were looking for.”

Worth waiting for

QUITE a few folk still under the weather. An Ayrshire reader swears he was round at his GP where a sign on the wall stated: “Welcome to the waiting room. If you don’t have a cough, one will be issued to you.”

A good run

GLAGOW-BORN Armando Iannucci’s irreverent comedy The Death of Stalin, which features former Python Michael Palin as Stalin’s protege Molotov, is nominated as Best British Film in the Bafta Awards. Joe McNally was reminiscing about Palin’s appearance at the Belfast Arts Festival in the early-1980s when he talked for 25 minutes then walked off the stage. It turned out he had prepared an hour-long talk but galloped through it in half the time.

So he went back out for a chat with the audience, and someone shouted out that it was a tradition for visiting speakers to run a lap of the theatre and that the record of three minutes was held by Groucho Marx. Without a word Michael jumped down from the stage, and ran round the hall in one minute 40 seconds. He now repeats it every time he is at the Festival Arts Theatre to see how his time is holding up.

Criminal record

WE mentioned music thefts from cars, and Rona Logan tells us: “We, too, suffered five radio and cassette thefts from our car in the late seventies. The police knew it was the same thief as every time he took every cassette except our favourite Johnny Cash tape. When it went to court he pled guilty so the 70-odd of us who had attended and didn’t need to give evidence had a hilarious time sharing which cassettes he had rejected. Turned out he didn’t like country music.”

Seeing spots

SOCIAL media may seem very modern, but some of the comments can be from earlier times. We noticed one political discussion on Twitter where a young woman told her opponent: “Your head’s full of dominoes and they’re all chappin’.” Any other old-fashioned insults that should be revived?

Having your cake

FOLK are trying to lose weight at this time of year of course. A west-end reader notices in his local Sainsbury that an area has been set up for folk to donate foodstuff to food banks. A quick shufti showed it was piled high with rich Christmas cakes, large panettone and boxes of shortbread – gifted presumably by those who had over-stocked at Christmas. Our reader wonders if it is the modern-day equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake”. And as a woman was heard telling her friends in a Glasgow coffee shop: “I wish I were as fat as the first time I thought I was fat.”

Fir goodness sake

ALSO in the west end, a reader was tut-tutting about the number of abandoned Christmas trees on the pavements that have still to be collected. It reminds us of the reader who once told us: “I regularly pass an embankment on the M74 extension in Glasgow where I noticed that a few fir trees that had been planted there had disappeared in the run-up to Christmas. “But good old Glasgow – they’ve now been returned over the fence – dead.”