A rotten trick

WE can’t get enough of Western Infirmary stories, and Fred McKenna in Kirkintilloch tells us: “Back around 1960 I worked in Hillhead Post Office. One night I was rushed into the Western with acute appendicitis and operated on overnight.

“Next morning I was wakened by a nurse who handed me a baby greetings telegram from my colleagues which read, ‘Alas poor Fred, he’s laid in bed with something wrong with his tummy. We cried, ‘Oh no, not Rottenrow, they’ve made poor Fred a mummy’.

“The nurses thought it hilarious.

I was too sore to laugh.”

Trump this

WE are obsessing about Donald Trump’s New York headquarters. Says Malcolm McCalister: “When in New York a while back I was enjoying the sights of the city from an open-top bus. When we passed Trump Tower, the guide commented that Mr Trump was not in that day as he was attending the birth of his next wife.”

Model reporters

TIME was when sports reporters got their news in smoky bars over a few halfs. But yesterday’s news of Celtic’s Swedish star Mikael Lustig signing a new contract came from model wife Josefin’s webpage, where she gushed about how good it was for the kids to stay in the same place for a while, how big a part of their life Glasgow was, and how they would stay here as Mikael was that day signing a new contract.

It’s nice that the sports reporters now have an excuse for staring at a model’s webpage most of the day.

Social climber

WE love how Tripadvisor has expanded from not just hotel reviews but to tourist attractions as well. Thus a tourist moaned about climbing Goat Fell mountain on Arran and wrote: “We got lost coming down and slid on our bottoms. We thought about phoning mountain rescue twice. A horrible experience. If someone has told me about it I would never have done it.

I will never even think about going near another one. My two ankles are swollen and my two big toe nails are bruised.

I will lose both nails. My wife got minor sunstroke.

“My worst experience ever.”

And he can’t even take it up with management or seek a refund.

Egg on his face

MUCH nostalgia amongst journalists after the TV documentary on The Scotsman. As one told his pals: “I turned up for a job interview in the 90s. I had massive egg and brown sauce stain down my front and I was an hour late. I told the editor a crazy ghost story from my overnight stay in Glen Coe and he still gave me the job.

“I backed out after signing my contract, and he went ballistic and refused to pay my expenses. I threatened to take him to the small claims court then send a few Scousers up to sort him out after I’d won.”

Yes, happy days.

It tore him apart

AND Alastair McKay remembered phoning in a review about the doom-laden Mancunian band Joy Division.

It somehow seemed more positive in print due to the copytaker mishearing him and calling the act Joy Davidson.