Tip of the iceberg
A READER swears to us that he heard a woman in the west end tell her pals: “It was ghastly. Shelf upon shelf without a vegetable on it.” When her pal asked: “Because of the bad weather?” she replied: “No, just a normal day in the shop near my office in Coatbridge.”

Causing a flap
AS MPs criticise the Government for halting a study into the menace of seagulls, we are reminded of the cheeky chap in Edinburgh who, after drink had been taken, found a dead seagull on the road. He picked it up, went into his local takeaway, slammed it on the counter and said: “That’s the last one I supply till you’ve paid for the rest.”
There was then a sudden exit by everyone waiting for food.

Shamed
WE suspect, only in Glasgow
A reader passing the Rufus T Firefly bar in Hope Street was much taken with the chalk board outside which carried the message: “To the guy who keeps coming in to do a wee jobby without buying anything, then pretends to be on his phone on the road oot to avoid eye contact - Hiya Pal!”

Sticking to the script
THE great British comedy writer Alan Simpson of Galton and Simpson fame has died. He once explained that, when he and Ray Galton started out after meeting in a TB sanatorium, nobody knew what scriptwriters were. Said Alan: “When we went to open a bank account, the manager said, ‘Well, what do you do?’ and we said,’We’re scriptwriters,’ and he thought we did sign-writing on windows. We said, ‘No, we write scripts,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but what do you do during the day?’”

Where it stemmed from
AFTER The Herald news story that the Ayr Flower Show is being axed, Brian Chrystal muses: “Ironic, is it not, that the person at South Ayrshire Council who pulled the plug on funding for the flower show is Lesley Bloomer?”

Present tense
VALENTINE’S Day next week – you can thank me for the tip-off – and a reader emails: “Advice for your Valentine: forget the past, you can’t do anything about it. Forget the present, I didn’t get you one.”

Just the ticket
WE don’t want to trespass onto Letters Page land where the poetry of the late Walter McCorrisken is being discussed, but we would just pass on from folk artist Roy Gullane: “We did a gig with him many years ago in a club in Paisley. He had everyone in stitches with a poem he said he’d written for the guy who was taking the tickets at the door. It went something like:

‘My wife is poorly Walter,
in fact she’s so unsteady,
I have to cart her doon the sterrs
tae get ma breakfast ready’.”

A reflection
TODAY’S piece of whimsy comes from James Martin who says: 
“People have  accused me of being a narcissist, so I’m off to take a long, hard look at myself in the mirror.”