A NEWTON Mearns reader is booking an appointment at Specsavers after SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon was interviewed in her own home by the BBC Breakfast programme.

Our reader scanned the bookshelves behind Nicola before calling his wife over to tell her: "Cornwall! Why would the leader of the SNP have so many books about Cornwall?"

His more alert wife took one look before telling him: "Cornwell. The American crime-writer Patricia Cornwell, you idiot."

STROLLING through Bearsden, a reader heard a woman point over to one of the town's churches and exclaim to her pal: "They're so posh in there I hear they have a communion wine list."

CANVASSING stories, and the retiring Labour MP in Dundee Jim McGovern tells us about a teenage student leafletting on the town's Perth Road at the last election who returned to the election rooms to breathlessly announce that a woman came to a door without a stitch on. Concerned in case she was a bit wandered, Jim asked the young canvasser if she was old. "Yes," said the lad, "she was at least 30," which made Jim, who was then 54, feel very old.

LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson wants restrictions placed on bagpipers playing the instrument in the city's streets. It reminds a reader of a bagpipe joke she once read in the Reader's Digest. It said: "How is playing the bagpipes like throwing a javelin blindfolded? You don't have to be very good to get people's attention."

MARTIN Hannan reads on the BBC website that Scotland's earliest non-religious manuscript "was probably published around 11:30 to 11:50." So not that old at all, thinks Martin.

WE mentioned the sad death of ventriloquist Keith Harris, and a reader reminds us of Nileism, Allan Brown's book on Glasgow group The Blue Nile, which tells of DJ Billy Sloan meeting the band in Glasgow club Henry Africa's after they had appeared on BBC show Saturday Superstore. The band's faces were tripping them and it took a while for Billy to coax it out of them what was wrong. Turned out that the panel who reviewed the band's single on the show included Keith and his puppet Orville the duck.

Orville said the single was rubbish, and the band were still in shock from a green duck slagging off their music.

A READER tells us about a Lanarkshire travel business which takes clients on pilgrimages to Lourdes and books them into the same hotel. A French waitress at the hotel, who spoke little English, asked the tour guide why the women from Lanarkshire often said: "Thank you, hen," when she served them tea. The guide taught her that the correct reply was "Nae bother", which now surprises the travellers when they thank her and she answers back.

CAN be tricky, conversations with little ones. A reader was on a train into Glasgow when he heard a father explain to his young son that dinosaurs were killed off by a meteor hitting the planet. The youngster digested this information before asking: "What if the asteroid was a UFO - and we're all from another planet."

The boy's dad really didn't have an answer for that.