CONGRATULATIONS to Glasgow-born John Lunn for winning an Emmy in America for his Downton Abbey music.

John once explained that he wanted to play the cello at school in Stirlingshire but they were all taken - and he was given a double bass instead.

Added John: "So few people played the instrument, and very quickly I was dragooned into playing for every orchestra in the county even though I could barely play it, so I was forced to learn very quickly."

And from that decision, his musical career took off.

Water mistake

GOING to the baths continued. A former St Aloysius pupil in Glasgow tells us: "Back in the late 1950s we had swimming lessons one morning each week, and had to sprint down through Cowcaddens to the local public pool, and woe betide any stragglers. The PE teacher was a wee hard man and took no prisoners.

"One luckless lad was seen to be getting changed rather too slowly and he was picked up and hurled half-dressed into the pool. As he sailed through the air he yelled the immortal line, 'ah'm no' at your school'."

Pull the other one

AND former PE teacher Lesley Falconer recalls one of her Lanarkshire classes she was teaching to swim. Says Lesley: "With all the girls in the pool, I stood on the side and demonstrated how to move your legs for a successful breast stroke. I did this by lifting my right leg in a frog-like manner.

"'Right girls. Off you go and try it yourselves.' I was then presented with the entire class swimming round in circles as they copied me exactly ... only using their right legs"

Your number's up

OUR picture yesterday of the car with the rude registration reminds David Macpherson in Prestwick: "I saw a Vauxhall Frontera in Grangemouth about 12 years ago with the reg P111 SHT. I wonder how often the police took this as an invitation to pull him over."

Fairway or foul

ALEX Salmond told Ryder Cup captains Tom Watson and Paul McGinley, at a Gleneagles Hotel dinner hosted by owners Diageo, that in 1921, Gleneagles welcomed American golfers who took on a British select side, with the Americans put up in railway carriages at Auchterarder Station. The First Minister joked that he'd make sure the same arrangement was put in place for the 2014 contest, with the Auchtermuchty pipe band called in to serenade the Yanks at 5am on each day of the competition. Well, we think he was joking.

Labouring the point

WE pass on Ed Miliband's gag from his Labour conference speech yesterday. "When you heard David Cameron casting around for someone to blame for the NHS, it's as simple as ABC - Anyone But Cameron."

Don't give up the day job would be a kind way of putting it.

Battle cry

APOLOGIES for the typographical error (mine) that had Johnny Beattie compering the charity show at the Battlefields Theatre in Largs this Sunday, when it is of course the Barrfields Theatre. As reader Jim Slavin tells us: "It's Barrfields. The battlefields were out at The Pencil monument where King Hakkon got gubbed in 1263. Either that or outside the town's pubs on a Saturday night."