Needle match

RAB C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison has a new play, Love and Death in Govan and Hyndland, running this week at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and a Pint season, which begs the question, has Ian’s life changed since moving from Govan to the trendy west end? “Of course,” he answers, “roughing it for me these days means having no soya milk for my hedgerow fruit porridge sachets.”

And does he have any special memories of Govan? “I always recall my granny sitting watching the wrestling on Saturday afternoons with scissors in her hand. She’d be swearing at the evil tactics of Mick McManus while cutting patches out of her slippers to accommodate her bunions,” says Ian, whose play is also on at Edinburgh’s Traverse next week.

Homage to Catalonia

A TELLING remark from Glasgow writer Robert Florence who says: “Amazing stuff from the people of Catalonia. Reminds me of when people in Scotland were so passionate about independence they started a blog.”

Putting the boot in IRVINE Weavers held their annual meeting and dinner at the weekend when former MP Brian Donohoe recalled fellow Labour MP and Deputy Speaker Harold Walker once telling him that he was delivering leaflets at an election. It was shortly after a Tory canvasser had been too lazy to push the Tory leaflets right through the letterbox, so Harold would take them out and stuff them in his pocket.

Disaster struck when he arrived at one door and, looking round, realised that he had walked through the wet cement of a newly laid driveway. Harold quickly took a Tory leaflet out of his pocket, shoved it through the letterbox and made his escape.

Post script

POSTCARDS continued. Says Martin McGeehan: “At a Scout Camp in Northern Ireland, we had all written our postcards and a Patrol Leader was sent to the nearest pillar box about two miles away with them all. He returned some time late, still with the postcards, and explained to a puzzled Scoutmaster that on the pillar box it said, ‘Letters only’.”

Shout out

MORE on bringing up children as a Hyndland reader emails: “There are constant shouts of ‘Get off the Xbox’, ‘Turn your music down’, ‘Stop eating all the chocolates’. I’m telling you, my kids are such nags.”

Knees up

WE turn again to a reader in America to help explain to us the latest controversy with President Trump who is claiming that black football players should be sacked for kneeling during the National Anthem before games. Says our reader: “The reason he is so vehement is that he is jealous of people who can kneel and get back up again.”

Runs his mouth off

THOUSANDS took part in the Great Scottish Run around Glasgow city centre at the weekend. A Glasgow reader heard a regular in his local pub at the weekend pontificate: “I always tell folk that I ran a half-marathon. It sounds so much better than saying, ‘I dropped out knackered halfway through a marathon’.”

Check him out

GROWING old continued. A Yorkhill reader tells us: “I remember when I was a student, falling out with my then girlfriend and screaming at her, ‘I don’t know what you want from me!’ Thirty years later I find myself screaming the same remark to the machine in the supermarket’s self-checkout area.”