OUR tales of pushy parents remind David Will in Milngavie: "There were the two south side ladies who met while out shopping at the Mearns Cross shopping centre.

'How old are the children now?' asks the first, making polite conversation. 'The doctor is five and the lawyer seven,' came the swift reply."

THE death of fantasy author Terry Pratchett reminds us of when viewers of the TV channel Drama voted one of his characters into third place in a poll of the best literary put-downs. It was the surreal snub in his novel Small Gods where Om the tortoise tells another character: "May your genitals sprout wings and fly away." Now that's quite a quotation to be remembered for, Terry.

And a reader tells us of Terry's sense of humour when he was invited to speak at a literary festival. He came on stage wearing a T-shirt on which he had printed: "Tolkien's dead. J.K. Rowling said No. Phillip Pullman couldn't make it. Hi, I'm Terry Pratchett."

A READER phones to tell us that Terry Pratchett left us with one final gift - he managed to get everyone to stop yakking on about Jeremy Clarkson. As we try to digest the news that Clarkson allegedly hit his producer because there was no hot food available, Ian Power concedes: "In all fairness to Clarkson, he only punches people when he feels hungry. Me on the other hand, would happily punch Clarkson however I felt."

WE occasionally delve into the world of job interviews. Someone in human resources swears to us that a job applicant was asked on the form he filled in: "Describe yourself in three words." He wrote: "Lazy."

ALTHOUGH unemployment is going down, many folk don't believe they have much job security these days. A chap in a Glasgow pub the other day remarked to his pals: "I bumped into the boss's car with the fork lift truck today, and he says he's taking the £500 to repair it out of my wages at a tenner a week."

He then added: "So the good news is that it looks like I'm guaranteed to keep the job for at least a year."

A READER said he heard a woman in Glasgow apologise to her friend for speaking to her in a loud voice. "I'm not really yelling at you," she said. "It's just that I got used to talking like this to my teenage children who always have their headphones on."

WATCHING telly with the elderly, continued. Says Debbie Meehan: "My husband was just a wee boy when the Flintstones were first shown on TV. His gran watched intently, and then remarked, as the bird was used as a tin opener, 'It's amazing how they train these wee things to do that'."

A PIECE of whimsy to end the week from Adam Hess who points out: "I don't like how the only two professions that wear wigs are people who can sentence you to life imprisonment, and clowns."