Bubble wrap

CULTURES collide, it seems, as folk head to Edinburgh for the Festival. The Rev. Richard Coles, onetime Strictly dancer, giving talks at the Fringe, explained yesterday: "Tremendous entertainment on the train to Edinburgh as someone who isn’t, but could be, Gwyneth Paltrow, requires to know the provenance and vegan credentials of the tea being briskly served by the Geordie LNER ladies."

And self-styled bubbleologist Louis Pearl, who has impressed audiences for years at the Fringe with his gravity-defying bubble tricks, tells us he recently had a lad about nine up on stage who volunteered to be put in a bubble. Having a chat with him, Louis saw the boy's arm was in a cast and asked what had happened. "A dog bit it," said the youngster. Trying for a laugh, Louis then asked: "What happened to the dog?” Instead of smiling, the boy said with a straight face: “He got castrated”.

Shelve it

AS many folk fear the worst if there is a hard Brexit, Russian Dmitri Grabov, now living in London, tries to be positive: "Don't let Project Fear scare you. I grew up with empty supermarkets and two-hour food queues in Moscow. Some days you got flour, other days you got cheese, maybe once a month you got sugar. The element of surprise made shopping incredibly exciting. You folks are in for a treat."

Top that

SAD to hear of the death of Sir Alex Fergusson, the bearded Ayrshire farm-owner who was a previous Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament. As our estimable colleague Rab McNeil wrote when Alex left the parliament: "It's a great shame he is retiring because, for a Tory, he came heavily disguised as a human being."

Alex himself told us the story of attending a family wedding in London when he was standing outside his hotel in top hat and tails when a young chap pulled up in his BMW and shouted out the window: "Ere mate. When does your bar open?"

Wading in

A YOUNG person explains to us how life has changed: "When I was very young, the most terrifying part of going into the sea when on holiday was thinking that a shark might attack you. Now my biggest fear is leaving my phone on the beach."

Got to go

GROWING old continued. A reader in Edinburgh phones to tell us: "I’m at that stage in life where my bladder is at its weakest and my phobia of public toilets is at its strongest."

Take the biscuit

THE Herald reports that former Glasgow MP Mohammad Sarwar could become Pakistan's next Foreign Secretary. It's a long way from when he opened his first shop on Maryhill Road which was plagued by rats. He explained in his autobiography, My Remarkable Journey: "They wreaked terrible destruction - bread, milk, biscuits and chocolate were all set upon. They were even capable of getting the plastic tops off lemonade bottles - presumably so they could have a drink to wash down the chocolate biscuits."

Sarwar hired a customer to build a new brick wall inside the existing wall, and cheerfully called the chap The Pied Piper of Maryhill every time he saw him.

Blue sky thinking

LOTS of tourists about in Scotland just now. David Russell tells us he and a pal arrived at an Edinburgh bus stop where two Australian girls were studying the printed timetable. Says David: "We stood behind them and, shielding our eyes from the sun's glare, checked the digital 'real time' board which sits on an adjacent, higher pole. 'Next one is not for 20 minutes' we told them. The girls looked at us askance. 'How can you tell just by looking at the sky?' one asked."