Cover up
JIM Gordon, spotting a condom theme running through recent Diaries, recalls that back in the 
late 1970s “Scotland’s favourite Sunday tabloid” came up with 
a strap line to show just how on-the-ball it was. The phrase was “If 
it’s going on it’s going in”. Naturally, it was too much for wags to resist, and it wasn’t long before it began 
to crop up on condom vending machines.

Man of letters
ON the same subject, John Mulholland says the anecdote 
about green Durex paint reminded him of the day when, as a young 
boy, he opened his parents’ 
wardrobe and glimpsed a large box 
at the back, with three letters 
visible: “…rex”. “Surely they hadn’t been bulk-buying those things?”, he thought, possibly with some alarm. Upon closer inspection he found, 
to his relief, that the box merely 
said Pyrex.

One way of putting it
HUGH Steele reports overhearing 
a man in the pub complaining about the summer TV schedules, specifically the repeats, and the trailers before every programme. “Aye”, the man said. “They’re 
just milking a dead horse.”

Bridge too far?
ALISTAIR Moss says he heard 
on the lunchtime radio news that 
the Queen had unveiled the new Queensferry Crossing, so naturally his first reaction was to speculate about the size of the sheet that 
must have been draped over the bridge. Belatedly, he realised 
that what the newsreader meant 
was that the Queen had “opened” the Crossing.

Religious art
FROM Deedee Cuddihy we hear 
of a one-day event at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, 
at which visitors were invited to 
step into a mobile confessional and give vent to their secret thoughts about modern art (e.g. “I love Beryl Cook”; “Tracey Emin is rubbish”) to Glasgow-based artists Alison McBride and Giovanni Giacoia, 
who were unseen behind a grille.
More than 60 people entered the confessional during the afternoon - and while the artists cannot, of course, reveal what was said to 
them, they did let slip that one 
punter declined to confess all when he discovered that neither of them was an ordained priest.

Breakfast of champions
OVER the last few years Jim Morrison and his wife June 
have spent long weekends in a west end hotel in Edinburgh. At breakfast in the restaurant there is always a bottle of whisky beside the porridge. Says Jim: “I have never seen anyone using it and on our last visit asked 
the chef in attendance if anyone ever did. ‘Oh aye’, he said. ‘The Japanese always use it -–they even put it 
on their bacon and eggs. Perhaps 
it’s an old custom in Japan’. True story.”

I get a kick out of you
THE Yellow Pages, which will 
cease publication in 2019, came in handy in so many ways. Derek Blakey remembers that whenever a someone got in trouble at his work, the directory would swiftly disappear – to be shoved down the back of the trousers and thus soften the blow from the swift kick that would be delivered by the boss.