Painful question

BBC Scotland reporter Ian Hamilton, who is blind, walked straight into a sign positioned in the approach to the main staircase at Pacific Quay, while on his way into work the other day. The sign read, “Have you ever thought about diversity?” With admirable restraint, Ian’s only comment was “The irony...”.

Pick up the pieces

LEGO has just announced that because of a drop in sales, 1,400 jobs will need to go. Some of their staff must be bricking it, says John Mulholland.

Nuns ‘n’ Roses

MORE band names ruined/improved by the replacement of one letter. Queens of the Scone Age, Nuns ‘n’ Roses, OMG (anon); The Why; Tuna Turner; The Beach Bogs; Poo Fighters; The Cute (Stephen McClymont and colleagues).

The Finks; Deacon Glue; Fake That; Slack Sabbath; Pimply Red; Toe Cure; Gerry and the Lacemakers (Christine Brooks); Silly J Kramer; Gerry and the Facemakers; Small Paces; James Frown, Silly Fury (Irene Elliott).

More, possibly, on Monday, when Len Smith - sorry, Ken Smith - returns.

Language barrier

ANOTHER packet of condom stories, just for the weekend. Brian Chrystal says: “Years ago, I was doing last-minute corrections to some notes before heading off for a post-work drink with some office colleagues, one of whom was a young American lady. Spotting an error in my pencil notes, I asked her if she had a rubber. Bearing in mind the different American understanding of that word, I liked her reply: ‘Let’s just go for a drink and see how we get on from there’.”

Tam Cowan emails with a possibly apocryphal story about “two big Alsatian dugs” having a blether as they walk down Sauchiehall Street.

“Do you take precautions when you make love?”

“Durex.”

“Naw, I asked you first...”

Bad taste in the mouth

ROBIN Gilmour is reminded of The Colonial Restaurant in Glasgow’s High Street, where he and a colleague lunched most days in the 1980s. The gents’ had a condom machine but seldom if ever did it actually contain any product. The owner saw it as a nice little earner as no-one ever complained that he had not received the flavoured product he’d paid £1 for.

Age concern

AND a very elderly Irvine reader recalls passing a coffee shop in Columbia and being given a sachet by a local man in uniform. His equally elderly wife, a few steps behind him, being ignored, demanded that she be given one also.

If she wondered why the man looked so bemused, she got the answer when she glanced inside the packet and saw, not coffee, but a condom, which was being given away as part of a local birth control initiative.

Ties that bind

IAIN Mann, reading yesterday’s Yarrow’s/YSL story, was a member of staff at at the yard in the 1970s.

“We had rather smart ties with the initials YSL prominent,” he says. “Mine was often admired by people I met, with surprise expressed that I was an Yves St Laurent patron and that gents’ ties were included in his fashion range.”

Iain accepted their compliments. He didn’t bother to correct them, either.