INTERNET dating sites are all the rage just now.

A Glasgow woman relays to us that she felt compelled to say to the chap she met online when they finally met in person for a meal: "You don't get out much do you?"

The reason for her question was when she ordered scallops, and they arrived in a scallop shell, her date remarked: "That's disgusting. They've served it in an ash-tray."

Any other internet dating tales?

Sound and fury?

A GLASGOW reader swears that he overheard a young chap on the bus the other day tell his pal: "My neighbours listen to some excellent music.

"Whether they want to or not."

Up to parr

WE won't ponder the merits or otherwise of Margaret Thatcher, but we will pass on the views of Ravenscraig shop steward Tommy Brennan who was asked on television what he thought of her after the devastation she brought to the Lanarkshire steel industry. Tommy said he did not like speaking ill of the dead but added: "I have a simple philosophy in life that if you look at every bad situation you may find a little plus there. The one plus I could find about Thatcher was that she brought salmon back to the Clyde – she closed all the industry on either side of it so they couldn't pollute it."

Maggie misnomer?

AND a comment, not so much on the late Prime Minister but on the education system. Donnie Pollock in Glasgow heard a young chap at his work discussing the funeral and asking: "Baroness Thatcher – was that her real name? Where did she get 'Maggie' from? Why are you all laughing?"

Money talks

THE debate about the divisions between rich and poor in Scotland continues. We don't know what it adds to the debate but we note from the names of babies born in Scotland last year, just put online by the National Records of Scotland, that one family named their son Cash, while another family called their boy Ebenezer.

'alf hearted

NICE work if you can get it– Matt Vallance reads an article in the magazine Sport in History by a Missouri State University academic entitled "Tennent's Lager, National Identity and Football in Scotland 1960s–1990s."

We wonder if the academic supped too much of the old Tennent's as he states in the article that Scots regularly ask in the pub for "a nip and an 'alf", which sounds more like Dick Van Dyke's dodgy Cockney accent rather than anything we've heard north of the Border.

Labouring the point

AN Edinburgh reader visiting her son in Australia had gone over for the birth of her grandson, and tells us that when she went to the maternity hospital to visit her daughter-in-law, someone had neatly added in pen on the door where it said Push the additional words "Push! Push!".