Bottled it
WE mentioned Glasgow linguistics and a reader tells us she was talking to a chap from Barcelona, working in Glasgow, whose four-year-old son is in a local nursery. Says your reader: "He said he asked his children how they were getting on learning English. He then poured some milk into a glass and said, 'You know this is called milk?' and his boy corrected him, 'You're saying that the wrong way – it's mulk, not milk'."
Piped up
WE asked for your Burns Supper stories as the great night approaches, and Hugh Murray in Helensburgh confesses: "A few years ago I was on meet-and-greet duty at the bowling club Burns Supper. The club had just completed a major upgrade and I was telling our piper for the night all about it in pre-supper hospitality. Realising I should have been listening rather than talking, I commented that it must be a great gift to be able to play the pipes and one that I would love to have. The piper commented, 'Well, yer half-roads there, a wid say'. Asked how that was, he said, 'Ye kin certainly blaw hard enough'."
Bit of a blow
NOT all Burns Suppers are taken seriously. We remember reading in Deedee Cuddihy's book How to Murder a Haggis about a couple in Partick hosting their own Burns Supper and inviting English friends who turned up with a "surprise" – a set of bagpipes they had made themselves from an old vacuum cleaner hose and a blown-up condom, stuffed inside a pair of tartan underpants.
Rings a bell
INEVITABLY there was a joke or two about the world's richest man, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, splitting up from his wife. As TV present Richard Osman put it: "I see Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s wife is leaving him. With a neighbour, presumably."
No half measures
OUR mention of folk taking souvenir glasses from bars reminded Billy Grierson: "A bar I visited in Ghent had an innovative way of dealing with this. Some of their beers were served in special glasses. When you ordered one, you had to give the barman one of your shoes. He worked on the basis that he could run faster than anyone wearing only one shoe. Given that the beer was around ten percent alcohol he was probably right."
Got his number
A GLASGOW reader said she heard a chap in a west end bar ask the woman he had been chatting to: "Would you like to swop phone numbers?" but she replied: "No, wouldn't that just confuse people trying to phone me?"
Name dropping
THE former head of radio at BBC Scotland, Jeff Zycinski, has written a light-hearted biography about his days in radio entitled The Red Light Zone. Jeff was brought up in Glasgow, where his father was a Polish Free Navy sailor who came here during the war, and stayed. Jeff writes that when he started his radio career as a newsreader at Moray Firth Radio, the Breakfast Show DJ had a competition to see which listener could spell Jeff's surname correctly. It took five days to find a winner. Some 15 years later Jeff was booking a hotel room in Inverness and the receptionist told him she had been the winner of the contest all those years ago. She and Jeff blethered for a bit about Moray Firth Radio before she got back to his room booking, when she kind of spoiled it all by asking: "And how do you spell Zycinski?"
What an affair
TODAY'S piece of daft sexist nonsense comes from an Ayrshire reader who emails: "I'm sure my best friend is having an affair with my wife.
"He seems so miserable lately."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here