WE pass on this observation from writer Sanjeev Kohli €who confirms something we've long suspected.

Says Sanjeev: "The main reason for bottle banks is to give middle class people some idea of what a fight sounds like."

YES it was St Patrick's Day yesterday of course, and a speaker at the St Patrick's Day Breakfast at Glasgow's Radisson Hotel recalled a conversation with a Dublin taxi driver which might resonate with the General Election in a few weeks. A Scots visitor engaged the taxi driver in conversation about the Irish election which had just taken place, and asked the driver what he thought of the outcome and the change in Government. The driver told him: "New circus. Same clowns."

THE late Irish story-teller Dave Allen was also recalled, and the time Dave recounted driving to Wicklow and coming to a T-junction where both the roads to the right and the left were signposted for Wicklow. Dave asked a loafer at the side of the road: "Does it make any difference which road I take?"

"Not to me it doesn't." the chap replied.

SOME folk of course use St Paddy's Day as an excuse to drink to excess. As someone heading out to an Irish bar last night joked: "I took a bus home after St Patrick's Day last year. That might not seem like a big deal - but I've never driven a bus before."

CONVERSATIONS that have to be passed on. A reader was in a Glasgow supermarket when he heard a young girl tell her pal: "I saw someone wheeling a triple buggy near Charing Cross and I couldn't work out how they could possibly get it through their front door."

Her wise pal told her: "They fold it up ya numpty." But that didn't convince the first girl who then asked: "Doesn't that hurt the kids?"

UKIP leader Nigel Farage's account of the last year in his party's history has just gone on sale, entitled The Purple Revolution, and already japesters are putting mock reviews on the Amazon booksellers internet site. One chap pretended it was a novel and wrote: "My least favourite fiction book so far. The characters weren't very relatable and the main guy whose perspective the story is told from, the pub drunk, I just didn't feel like he had many dimensions, considering he was the central character of the narrative."

The most harsh however was the reviewer who just put: "The Poundland Mein Kampf." Reviews so far - 5 five star and 48 one star.

ELSEWHERE in politics Scots writer Ross Craig tries to make sense of the latest controversy over young people going to war-torn Syria by arguing: "Politicians are never happy. They demand that young people show 'British values' then get annoyed when they join an illegal war in the Middle East."

WE end with a piece of whimsy from James Martin who tells us: "Revenge is a dish best served cold. Pretentiousness is a dish best served flambé, with quinoa, and a blackcurrant jus."