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Diary Editor

Thursday 25 October 2012

TOM Hosie was in a west end restaurant when a couple complained the dessert they had ordered was taking a long time to arrive.

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Ken Smith

Says Tom: "The dessert duly arrived, and a short time later, in no doubt an attempt to placate further, the manager stopped at their table and asked whether the couple were celebrating anything special.

"'Just the arrival of the dessert,' was the dead-pan reply."

Major operationSIR Walter Scott's hefty Ivanhoe novel has been edited to half its size by Professor David Purdie to make it more accessible to new readers.As ex-surgeon Prof Purdie put it at the novel's launch by Scottish publishers Luath Press: "I removed more colons than in a lifetime of abdominal surgery."Taken to the cleanersDAVID Macleod in Lenzie tells us an enterprising wee business distributed leaflets at his office offering: "Car Wash – £7. Valet – £7. Wash and Valet combined – £15."Says David: "I phoned them to point out the problem. "'That explains a lot,' said the voice on the other end of the phone. 'We couldn't understand why so many folk were ordering a wash and a valet, but separately.'"Copy thatTHE BBC took over the Platform Theatre in Easterhouse last week for Question Time. Iain Urquhart, who was there, passes on: "An important-looking TV person with a handful of paper commanded my young colleague to 'Take me to the scanner'. "Being a helpful theatre type, he led her to the photocopier. And not the massive truck with a satellite dish on top, which apparently was what she wanted."Savings and loanA SOUTH side reader tells us his eight-year-old daughter told her big sister: "I'm going to get one of those big buckets of Halloween sweeties with my £1 pocket money and ask Dad to give me next week's pocket money so I can buy another for my pal, and then I won't get any pocket money next week."Her sister, wiser by two years, replied: "Dad won't let you do that. That's what Rangers did."The weegie gamesAS THE Glasgow Commonwealth Games slowly approaches, a reader asks if the games have a motto – for example the London Olympics used the phrase "Inspire a generation". We didn't know of one, but as it is in Glasgow we wondered if they would adopt the colloquial phrase "Take a run and jump". Can any readers suggest a motto more appropriate for Glasgow?A cut aboveANNE Johnstone and Martin Shields's just-published glossy book, Strathblane and Blanefield Now & Then, tells of a blacksmith at the Blane Smithy generations ago who was also a vet, a doctor and a dentist, treating cuts, for example, with a red-hot iron to seal them with tar. A local who bought the book, a pictorial history of the villages below the Campsies, said they shouldn't send the book to the Coalition Government in case it gave them any ideas for saving money on the NHS.

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