Time to vet him

OUR stories from Glasgow buses remind David Miller in Milngavie of music hall comedian Sammy Murray who told his audience he was on the top-deck of a double decker where an attractive woman on the seat across the aisle had her pet dog on her knee. "I wouldn't mind taking the place of the wee dug," Sammy told her in those less enlightened times. "Please yourself," she replied. "I'm takin' him to the vet to have him put down."

Not caged in

STILL a few holiday tales coming in as Jim Morrison tells us of recently visiting Lake Como in Italy where two ladies from Kelso at the same hotel said they were taking the ferry across the lake the next day to the town of Bellagio as they had been told there was a miniature railway which took you up the mountain to where there was a great zoo at the top. Jim had never heard of it but he wished them a good trip and next night asked them how it went.

They confided it was fine but there had been no zoo - seems they had misheard the local who told them there was in fact a great view from the top of the mountain.

Their view was coloured

WE asked for your GP stories, and Russell Smith in Kilbirnie recalls: "I saw this with my own eyes in a very rural Scottish single-principal practice in the early sixties - four large glass containers on a shelf containing white, green, yellow and pink tablets. The doctor told me they were all aspirin but often his patients would say things like, 'The white ones didnae help, but the yellow ones did'."

Stirring speech

AT the BRITISH Academy Scottish Bafta awards the other night, Glasgow-born writer Armando Iannucci was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Film and TV award. The prize was handed over by actor Peter Capaldi who appeared in Armando's great political satire The Thick of It. Peter pointed out that words Armando created such as "omnishambles" are now commonly used. Added Peter: "Even William Shakespeare, The Bard of Avon, would have been very proud if he had come up with a line as poetic as 'Who shat in my porridge?'"

Facing up to it

AND talking of Scottish actors, Ashley Jensen told the Radio Times this week that there was too much pressure on female actors to look young and glossy. Said Ashley: "Women are not allowed to grow old. It's becoming more normal to see a face that looks like a cross between a hard-boiled egg and a cat."

Pub tales

THERE is also a lot of pressure on young men these days to show off their brains and not just their brawn. A Glasgow reader heard a young chap in his local pub at the weekend ask his pals: "Can anyone recommend a good book I can tell people I'm reading?"

Lost at sea

BIT of a stooshie over the so-called Paradise Papers with the BBC reporting that three stars from the television comedy Mrs Brown's Boys diverted over £2m. into companies in Mauritius before sending the money back as a loan. A reader in Partick phones to tell us: "I only hope that all the episodes of Mrs Brown's Boys are hidden offshore and never seen again."

It's a wrap

OUR story about the girl eating Starburst wrappers provokes Roy Gardiner in Kilmarnock: "I remember the original Opal Fruit and there was no way that you would think that the wrapper was edible as it often, when warm, had to be prised off with superhuman force."