Icing on cake

GOOD to see that the Scottish Music Awards in Glasgow at the weekend raised nearly £150,000 for the music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins. The keyboard player of The Waterboys, Brother Paul Brown, flew over from Nashville to accept the band's Outstanding Contribution to Music award - and then won £1000 worth of wedding cake vouchers in the raffle. When asked how he was planning to get the patisserie products back to Nashville he declared: "Who cares, I'll find a way!"

And it can happen when you are having a good time - TV presenter Muriel Gray lost her phone at the awards and asked on social media: "If anyone finds a phone in a case with a picture of a marmot on a mountain, in a hat, and wearing a rucksack with a baguette in it, it's mine." So not much chance of anyone picking that up thinking it was their phone.

Testing time

OUR driving test story reminds Evelyn Hogarth: "A friend who sat his test at 17 while still at school met his mates after the test who wanted to know why he failed. 'Well it says lack of awareness of pedestrians. But I can't understand it, as I never saw any,' he told them."

Had his chips

WE read in the Sunday Herald that a Labour MSP wants the boss of Edinburgh Airport to apologise to sex workers after he explained at a dinner that when he worked at Scotrail, the first train out of Glasgow to Gourock on a Sunday morning was known as the "Whorient Express" because of the number of ladies of the night returning home after a hard night. It somehow reminds us of our favourite Gourock story about the seven lads leaving the Spinnaker pub and one of them going in the boot of the car as there was not enough room. They stopped at a chippy with the six regular passengers piling into the shop when, after a few minutes, two police officers came in and asked who the owner of the blue car was. Fearing a multiplicity of traffic offences, the driver owned up. "Well," the sergeant told him, "the guy in the boot wants chips too."

All adds up

EASY start for England in the World Cup as they are drawn in a group with Panama, Belgium and Tunisia. As Dave Cohen puts it: "Panama should be an emotional game as the England footballers will come face-to-face for the first time with their accountants."

It's criminal

LACHLAN Bradley visits the Highlander Bar in Melbourne where the cocktail menu includes a Buckfast Negroni. The menu then goes on to explain: "A Scottish twist on the original, combining gin, Campari and Buckfast tonic wine. Warning: contains caffeine and may cause crime."

Chubby hubby

A WEST End reader hears a woman in a coffee shop tell her pals who were gossiping about a mutual friend: "She's always slagging off her husband behind his back. I mean, my husband is fat, lazy, and a miser with his money, but you never hear me say a bad word about him, do you?"

Easy goal

OUR mention of the businessman returning to Glasgow Caledonian University for an honorary degree and confessing that when he was a student there he got free games on the table football by putting fuse wire through a 10p coin, reminds Russell Smith: "Years earlier, the non-tech way in the Glasgow University Union of getting a free game was sliding a spatula under the mechanism. It was a closely guarded secret by those in the know."