Sweet smell of success

READERS have been pondering children’s names after Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg named his sixth child Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher. Reader John Delaney in Lochwinnoch tells us: “There was a family at my wife’s school with four sons. Their fifth child was born a girl, and the parents called her ‘Chanel Number 5’.”

Never won Fair lady

SADLY not many folk will realise that it is Fair Friday in Glasgow a week today. Ian McCloy in Bishopton recalls: “Many years ago my then girlfriend had arranged before she met me a holiday with her girlfriends in Spain for the Fair Fortnight.

“After the holiday one of her friends came up to me and said, ‘I think it best that you know that your girlfriend met a boy on the very first night and went out with him every day of the holiday. Oh and by the way, if you are thinking of dumping her, I’ll go out with you’.”

Any other Fair Fortnight memories?

Cup of good cheer

A READER passes on that she was in a Partick charity shop where a couple of elderly English ladies came in and were perusing the knick-knacks on the shelf. One of them handed an elaborate cup and saucer to her pal and asked her if she thought it was 19th century. “Don’t think so, dear,” she replied. “It says on the bottom ‘Dishwasher safe’.”

One for the road

LANGUAGE misunderstandings continued. Says John Crawford in Lytham: “I was once attending a conference in Cambridge with two Scottish councillors. They were in a B&B while I’d booked into an hotel. They came round for a drink and the session ended with me having to rouse the night porter and ask him, ‘Can you order a taxi for my colleagues?’ Ten minutes later he came through the lobby shouting ‘Taxi for McAulay’, enraging the councillor of that surname who demanded to know why I’d let everybody know he was in the hotel at that time of night.”

Crashing her birthday party

A BEARSDEN reader tells us it was her birthday at the weekend and her teenage children said she should relax and they would cook the Sunday dinner. She jumped up at the sound of the first plate crashing in the kitchen and told them, ‘Telling me to relax while you take over is like telling the captain of a plane to relax as the passengers are going to fly it’.”

Snap election

IT was the funeral yesterday of Glasgow Labour councillor and onetime transport authority boss Alistair Watson, a big chap with a commanding presence who nonetheless patiently listened to us as we tried to persuade him of a Diary competition to rename a Glasgow Subway station - “Not a main station, just one of the wee diddy ones” was our argument.

Anyway, we recall covering a by-election in Anniesland where Alistair tried to cheer us up by saying he got bitten by a West Highland terrier while delivering a Labour leaflet.

Then the SNP claimed that three of their volunteers had been bitten. We couldn’t work out whether that meant the SNP were putting three times the effort into the campaign, or whether the SNP were three times more unpopular with Glesga dugs.

Learning a lesson

GROWING old, and Harry Clark in Bishopbriggs says: “While on teaching supply I was told, ‘Sir, you used to teach my Granny’. It used to be ‘my mother’. Time to retire again.”