The dating game

WE don’t always read as far as the warnings printed on packets of food, but Carole Gillan perused her just-bought packet of dates from Tunisia and read: “May occasionally contain insects.”

“Occasionally? Och, that’s okay then,” says Carole.

Condign punishment

OUR school caps stories stumbled into the dark world of corporal punishment and our old pal Gerry Burke tells us that his old school St Aloysius carried on with the belt after it had been abandoned in state schools. A group of pupils, amongst them future lawyers and journalists, gathered in Partick station waiting room to compose a highly indignant and lengthy letter to the Glasgow Herald to decry the practice.

By the time they were finished they reckoned it was too late to go to school and dogged off to the nearby Rosevale Cinema.

Someone clyped to the school – and yes they were all given the belt the next day.

Google-eyed

A GLASGOW reader hears a young woman in the queue for sandwiches at M&S tell her friends that she had met a fellow in the pub and agreed to go out with him. She then added: “I’ve not even searched his name on Google.

“I know, I’m such a romantic.”

Clueless

DONALD McLarty was filling in yesterday’s small crossword in The Herald when he mused: “Eight across is a five-letter word meaning ‘nitwit’. So far I know that it begins with T and ends with P.

“I think this is a RUM clue.”

And talking of the Trump inauguration and the lack of big names willing to perform at it, Peter Thompson opines: “I’m glad Michael Flatley is going to dance for Trump. It means my previously irrational dislike of the man now has a rational basis.”

No half measures

POSSIBLY because the Burns Suppers are starting, Duncan Ferguson in Achmore, near Plockton, tells us: “As an Islayman I love the tale of the old doctor on that island whose mantra was, ‘For true good health you must have your five-a-day: Bowmore, Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhainn, Lagavulin and Laphroaig.’”

Drink to that

AND as a drunk in a Glasgow pub once told us: “If only they’d named vodka as potato juice we could pass it off as a health drink.”

End of the world

HEALTH issues, and David Will in Milngavie says: “New Year, new dentist, my previous one having retired. Nothing to fear I thought. The background music as I entered the surgery? R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts.”

Nice try

A SOUTH side reader remarks: “Anyone who’s struggled with an appropriate response to the glazing/conservatory salesmen at the exit doors of DIY stores might appreciate this Stanley Baxteresque response at B&Q East Kilbride. A couple leaving the store were asked by the salesman, ‘Do you need any new windows or doors?’ The guy answers, ‘Dae we need to pay fur them?’”

Toilet humour

AT last a colleague made me smile when he came over to tell me: “Been struggling with diarrhoea for nearly a week.

“But finally I have worked out how to spell it.”