SPOTTED at a certain shopping centre not far from here, or so we're told.

At the festive grotto, one of Santa's little helpers was seen taking a photograph of himself. Wonders our man on the spot: "Is this the world's first recorded 'Elfie'?"

This Friday feeling

WE'RE not in the least superstitious at the Diary but we did think we might be tempting fate if we ran more of your superstitions today - which, as a glance at the very top of this page will remind you, is Friday the 13th.

And, just for good measure, we're on Page 13.

In the end we decided it was a risk worth running. We need to fill this space somehow.

"I once stepped on a crack in the pavement," Bruce D Skivington volunteers. "This being Edinburgh, I found myself up to my knees in a pothole."

Festive seasoning

"IF," suggests Stuart Allan, "you spill salt you should lift a pinch and throw it over your left shoulder.

"Similarly, to be on the safe side, if you add salt to a cooking pot by pouring it into your hand you should cast the dregs over your left shoulder.

"This will prevent the Devil from creeping up behind you to try to capture your soul."

Sound advice. We all hate it when that happens. Fair ruins your Christmas.

Very clever ...

INTELLECTUAL jokes, continued. An intellectual was once asked for the difference between 'joist' and 'girder'.

"Joyce wrote Ulysses," he responded, "but Goethe wrote Faust."

Blame Jock Laidlaw for that one.

Mum's the word

PILOTS' announcements, continued.

Gilbert MacKay swears he heard this being announced on a red-eye flight from Glasgow some years ago:

"Sally is in charge of the cabin staff for your flight to Heathrow this morning. It's her last day with BA as she is leaving us to get married. (Pause) And we didn't even know she was pregnant."

Safari lark

PETER McMahon gets in touch with, he says, something you would never expect to hear in Glasgow.

"Passing a burger food stall in St Enoch Square today I heard the stall holder say: 'Sorry we're all out of Zebra but we've got Impala in its place.'"

Is this, he asks, a sign of global warming arriving in Scotland at last?

Word puzzle

THE Diary's shame-faced admission of its inability to tell a pronoun from a preposition stirred a distant memory in one reader.

Writes John Hall: "I remember being taught at school that a preposition is a word you should never end a sentence on."

Thanks, John. That really clears things up.

Indian takeaway

AND finally ... A late contender for headline of the year, from an online news report of the hacking trial yesterday: 'Queen angry at police eating her Bombay mix'.