The face of crime

MONKLANDS Police yesterday tweeted details of the theft of £600 of Boots cosmetics. “We are looking”, they declared with a straight face, “for a 40 y/o man who looks 20, glowing skin, long eyelashes, raised eyebrows & pronounced lips”.

Jailhouse rock

GLASGOW singer-songwriter Findlay Napier, whose new album, Glasgow, is out on October 13, was up in HMP Porterfield with the Dingwall-based Feis Rois music outreach team. Findlay was teaching ukelele to some of the prisoners. “There was one point where we were all playing together”, he says, “and we were assigned a prison officer. We strummed the last chord and the officer said enthusiastically: “That was great! When can we take this out on tour?” There was a pause, and someone else murmured, “Well, I think security might be an issue”.

Stuck on tofu

CATERING for vegans is never easy, says David Donaldson. He and his wife Marion were in Aldi, searching for soya milk, non-dairy butter and things of that ilk. Eventually, Marion asked one of the staff if they had any tofu. “The sweeties are over there”, she replied, helpfully.

The Hardy Boy

HARDY by name, Hardy by nature. The esteemed actor Robert Hardy, who died last week, aged 91, was tough and resilient. Robert Love, producer of the STV film Between the Covers, which was filmed in Peebles, says the denouement had Hardy marooned on a hotel fire escape, on a freezing winter’s night, dressed only in a T-shirt and boxers. “He was a real trouper that night”, recalls Robert. “There was not a whinge at what we were putting him through - even with a retake or two”.

Rocket man

FURTHER reactions to the America-North Korea end-of-civilisation scenario. “I liked it better”, tweets Richard Osman, “when Donald Trump used to say ‘you’re fired’ to people instead of to inter-continental ballistic missiles”. Sanjeev Kohli: “The whole Trump/N Korea situation has some positives - e.g. you don’t have to bother shelling out on the 5 year warranty on that new oven”.

And while we’re the last people to point to errors in other newspapers, we couldn’t help but see that one paper, in Maine, accidentally headlined its report “Trump warns of ‘fire and furry’”.

Unusual suspect

ALL this sobering commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the death of the Princess of Wales reminds Tim Malseed of a story involving a friend of his. The friend’s gran phoned very early in the morning, telling him urgently: “Quick, put your television on. Something has happened to Diana in Paris - she ‘s been chased into a tunnel by Pavarotti on a scooter”.

Those were the days

HUGH Steele is the latest reader to submit details of a precious ticket stub - or, as he prefers to describe it, an “old bit of souvenir junk from 1973 I never got round to chucking out”. The ticket is for a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

“These were the days”, says Hugh. “A good two hours of the Prokofiev ballet, then a couple of pints in The Green Horn pub in St Martin’s Lane, and still have plenty change left from a fiver. Mind you, I think my weekly wage was only about £7 at the time ...”