A bit rubbish

IT’S just over a month away, and a reader emails: “I stopped a bloke in the street and said, ‘Can you help me? I’m looking for a rubbish tip.’ He replied, ‘England to win the World Cup’.”

Timely response

OUR tales of being tardy at work remind Duncan Shaw in Kilwinning: “Back in the seventies when Glasgow Corporation had a bus works in Victoria Road I was walking across the yard on my way into work one morning in the company of an older workmate. It has to be said this was some time after when we should have clocked in. We were joined by the boss whose only comment, as it turned out, was ‘Late!’ Without so much as a sideways glance my friend’s response was. ‘So are we’. End of conversation.”

Cotton on

MEETING famous people, continued. Says reader Sybil Wallace: “A chance meeting with the great golfer Sir Henry Cotton as he was coming out of the Peninsula Hotel in Portugal where he lived in his latter years. We were complaining about the rubbish golf we’d just played. He remarked, ‘But you can get better, whereas I can only get worse!’ Heartbreaking. But we didn’t!”

On the sniff

OUR whisky stories reminded George Maxwell in Lochgilphead of his younger brother, when 17, being an apprentice painter and having to work at a distillery in Dumbarton. Says George: “I got home to be told by our mother I should have seen the state of my brother who had come home the previous evening ‘drunk as a monkey’.

“Turned out there was a pail of whisky at the distillery and everyone could help themselves by dipping a cup in. He told our mother his condition was caused by breathing in the fumes at the distillery, and our mother believed him.”

As all mothers should.

Hair raising

TOM Rafferty saw a chap remove his cap in the street, his wig accidentally coming off with it. Says Tom: “It reminded me of when I worked in Motherwell, and stopped off for a pint near the station. Across from me was a bloke who was smiling, waving, and I had no clue who he was. Then he lifted his toupe, and I recognised him. He was one of the engineers I worked with at Ravenscraig. He explained he couldn’t wear it in work because it got caught up in the hard hat. So he kept it for going out.”

Speaking her language

WE mentioned the 50th anniversary of the disbandment of the Cameronians regiment, and a reader sends us to a history website where a volunteer is interviewed about his father being in the Cameronians in France in the First World War.

The chap said: “They had got some sausages, but didn’t have a frying pan and my father was asking a French woman for a pan but couldn’t make himself understood. A soldier with him stepped in and said to the woman, ‘Parlez vous Francais?’ She of course said ‘Oui,’ and the soldier continued in English, ‘Can we have an effin frying pan?’ and somehow she came out with a frying pan.”

Just pottering

IT can happen to the best it seems. Harry Potter writer JK Rowling told her fans on social media yesterday: “The great thing about editing is how you get to look back on the triumphant moment after your 19th readthough when you you were sure yuo’d caugth all the the typoes, and hat yourself for beng such a stupid, smug barstard.”

Green with envy

GRANNIES are the best, aren’t they? Sandra Williams in North Berwick tells us: “Overheard in North Berwick High Street. Grandmother asks young grandson what his bright green lollipop tastes of. ‘Lime’, he replies. ‘That’s good for you’, she says.