Half-baked idea
THE Great British Bake Off was back on the telly this week. As someone told us: “Before Bake Off began I promised myself I would have a go at baking all the technical challenges this year.
“After the first episode I just said to myself, ‘No, that lot are 99p in the Co-op – much easier.”

Wishy-washy lot
MUCH debate in political circles about Kezia Dugdale resigning as Scottish Labour leader. Some folk were critical, but we like our old chum Ruth Wishart who declared: “Kez Dugdale has gone. A woman who accepted a poisoned chalice when many of the boys remembered they were washing their hair.”

Sent to Coventry
STILL, amongst the boys being mentioned to take over from Kezia is the estimable Richard Leonard. He was once chairman of the Scottish Labour Party at the same time as being a full-time official with the GMB union. As he explained at the time: “My GMB colleagues listen to my Labour Party speeches and 
if I say anything contrary to union policy they send me a three-word 
text message. It says: ‘The Dingwall Office’.’’

Sock it to me
WOW! Impressive pictures of the swanky sleepers to be introduced next year on the London to Scotland night trains – some will have double beds and showers.
Our favourite description of a sleeper journey was our late, great, colleague Willie Hunter after Scotland beat England at Wembley in 1967, who wrote: “After taking a refreshment, I fell on to the top bunk of a train sleeper from Euston. At wakey-wakey time the mouth felt like the inside of Jim Baxter’s stockings.
‘’Silently, over the rim of the bed appeared a bottle of Irn-Bru. With my provident companion from downstairs, who turned out to be a van driver and a Clyde supporter, there was a happy hour of living the triumph all over again, while we took our mornings of his Bru and what we could find in our half-bottles.’’

She’s ill. Period
ROSIE Jones hears a woman declare: “I’m coughing so much that if I were in a period drama, I’d be dead by the next episode.”

Asleep at the wheel
OUR tale about the Renfrew Ferry reminds former cop David Russell of when it was a car ferry, steered by chains across the river. Says David: “We were told the apocryphal tale by a sergeant at the Police College that the crew moored the vessel mid channel to see in the New Year. In  the early hours some local worthies  rowed out to liberate some bevvy from the unconscious sailors.
“As they rowed ashore, Renfrew’s finest were waiting, and after much deliberation, the scallywags appeared at the Burgh Court charged with piracy. The Justice of the Peace saw the funny side. Allegedly.”

Knight time
WE mentioned the former principal of Jordanhill College, the late Sir Henry Wood, being a man of few words. His daughter Alison May in Milngavie tells us: “There are many such largely apocryphal tales of his reticence. After he received his knighthood, he was also known as the Silent Knight.”

Wrong connection
AN EDINBURGH reader tells us: 
“I went into a cafe the other day and there was a sign on the counter which said, ‘We have no wi-fi. Pretend it’s like the old days’. So I gave them 40p for my coffee and lit up a fag. Apparently that’s not what they meant.”