IT'S not just the Scotland team that has had call-offs from the international against Croatia tomorrow.

Some of the fans are backing out also.

Kevin Donnelly, chairman of the Tartan Army supporters club in London, Lunnainn Albannaich, tells us one club member took the biscuit for calling off from flying out to Zagreb "as he has to take his tortoise to the vet".

Lets hope the Scotland team move a lot quicker than the pet.

Bear facts?

THE front-page picture in The Herald yesterday was of First Minister Alex Salmond with one of the Edinburgh Zoo pandas. Robert Bennie in Glasgow couldn't stop himself from telling us: "It was a great portrait of an overweight and increasingly rare and endangered species – and the other one is a panda."

What a pane

MUNGO Henning was in a discussion about how cold houses were before central heating when one chap upped the ante by declaring he could remember winters so cold that ice formed on the inside of glass windows.

Says Mungo: "His bubble was burst when someone countered his claim with the remark: 'Lucky so-and-so had glass'."

Deathly silence

IT'S sometimes difficult catching the drift when you join a conversation at a party. David Rodger in Ayrshire tells us one friend's wife joined such a discussion and was asked what she thought about euthanasia. She said she thought Asian youths had just as many chances as their counterparts in Europe these days.

Not a prayer...

DRIVING to church continued. Tony Martin out in Vanuatu in the Pacific recalls on a trip back to Riddrie in Glasgow offering to drive his elderly mother and next door neighbour to church. Says Tony: "All went well until I swung out onto the right, that is, the wrong, side of the road causing screams, screeching of breaks, and all round mayhem.

"When I suggested that I had almost done them a favour by sending them to their maker while still in a state of grace having just left his church, I was entertained by some opinions not normally expressed by two octogenarians fresh from the house of God."

Bottled up

WE mentioned the Coca Cola bottles with names on them and a reader swears that he heard a young chap ask his father if he could search the Coke bottles for his name, and his father replied: "Why don't you have a Pepsi, Max?"

Address to the nines

WELL we asked about the arithmetical quirkiness of an uncle and niece being able to reverse their ages in certain years – 51 when she was 15, 62 when she was 26 and so on.

William Mould, the IT manager at Slaters Menswear tells us: "Subtracting two positive numbers that are transpositions of each other always results in a number that is a whole multiple of nine, for example.. 51-15=36 (3+6) =9 , 62-26=36 (3+6)=9. This works for any positive number no matter how big the number e.g. 654 - 456 = 198 (1+9+8 = 18 . 1+8 = 9)."

Exactly what we were thinking, William.