Had a skinful

EXCITING pop news! Bananarama, Britain’s most successful girl group, are reforming and starting a tour at the Armadillo in Glasgow in November. We still remember our old chum and music savant on The Herald, David Belcher, who went to review the girls way back in 1989. David thought long and hard about saying something positive about them and eventually told Herald readers: “The ‘Nanas didn’t sound quite as flat and shrill and listless as they do on record.”

Cutting remark

SOME strange weather in Scotland just now. As John Neil Munro put it: “Stornoway gardening news update - just waiting for the hailstones to melt before we cut the grass.”

Cracking up

OUR story about the banter of street traders reminds David Will: “The chap that used to sell crockery at the Barras would toss the cups, saucers, and plates to his able assistant who would gather them up expertly before putting them in a paper bag. ‘Erzyer cups, erzyer saucers and erzyer plates’ he would cry. ‘I’m not asking ten quid, eight quid or six quid - put your money away ladies. When you hear the price you’ll genuflect’.”

Out of the mouths of babes

WE have to beware of politicians telling whoppers just now. SNP Lanarkshire MSP Fulton MacGregor said on social media: “Proud of my nine-year-old nephew. Asked me about being an MSP. I told him I was in the SNP, and he said, ‘Great. That’s the party that stands up FOR Scotland!’”

Casting doubt was Derek Stevenson who replied: “My 18-month-old nephew said you’re obsessed with independence and haven’t governed properly for eight years. What a boy eh?”

In over her head

RELIGION can be confusing to younger folk. Diary regular John O’Neill in Killearn – happy 70th birthday! – tells us about his young grand-daughters discussing a fully immersive baptism the seven-year-old had watched in church. She was in the back of the car discussing it with her three-year-old sister who asked: “Who pushes them in?” When told no one, she asked: “Did any do a backward roll into the water?”

Again the answer was in the negative. Finally she asked: “Do they call the ambulance straight away?”

What occupied her mind

STUC President Helen Connor was reminiscing yesterday when she opened the annual trade union conference in Aviemore that in the 1970s she was part of the student occupation of Jordanhill College in an attempt to keep it open. “There was a degree of excitement, being on the switchboard and saying Jordanhill College of Occupation, rather than Jordanhill College of Education,” she recalled.

Did it affect her studies? She added: “I was so busy with the occupation that I failed all my exams. I didn’t tell my parents. I just worked really hard for the resits and passed all of them.”

A wind-up

I FOOLISHLY asked a colleague what he’d been up to while I was off and he told me: “I asked the boss if I could leave an hour early. He said, ‘Only if you make up the time. So I told him, ‘Okay. It’s 45 past 56’.”