CURRIES in Glasgow continued.

Says Jean Harbison in Haddington: "I was taken to the Kohinoor on a first date. It was very busy and the only seats available were at a table with two young men halfway through their meal. My date and I were so absorbed in each other we barely noticed them leaving.

"When the bill was brought it transpired that as they left they indicated to the waiter that their 'friends at the table' - us - would pay the bill for the whole table. We hotly denied any connection with them and the manager accepted this straight away. That may have been because my date was well over six-foot tall, but from the host's resigned manner I think it more likely that this strategy was not unknown to them."

A FEMALE reader in Edinburgh tells us: "If there is one thing I loathe it is being called 'pet' or 'sweetheart' by some creep I don't even know. Taxi driver, 'Where is it today, sweetheart?' Me, 'Newington, honeybunny'. He looked in his mirror, puzzled. Boy, if I looked puzzled every time someone addressed me in a derogatory manner, I'd have my eyebrows permanently raised to the sky."

TALKING of sexist, a few folk seemed concerned that the remake of the film Ghostbusters will feature an all-female ghost-busting crew. Said one male film-fan a trifle sniffily: "Heck, you ladies are afraid of a little spider. How are you going to catch a ghost?"

SAD to read in the drinks industry magazine The Dram that Dave Smith, who ran Glasgow's great Horse Shoe Bar for 20 years before his retirement, has passed away. He really was the most convivial of landlords. As Susan Young at The Dram explained: "When he was manager of The Horse Shoe his first question to prospective employees was 'Do you like to smile?'. He would then tell them, 'Folk don't go to the pub to see a greetin' face'." Gosh, there's a few landlords out there that could learn from that.

STRANGE are the stories in foreign newspapers. David Reynolds in Dubai - "81 degrees today, by the way" - tells us of the local newspaper reporting that a traveller from Asia was stopped at the airport with a suitcase full of a dead python he was trying to smuggle into the country. He explained he'd brought it in to eat it. David says the paper missed a trick by not using the headline "Manky Python's Flying Carcass".

AN Iranian English-language television station asked folk on Twitter what questions they would like to ask provocative MP George Galloway. Naturally they were submerged with all sorts of nonsense. But with the hashtag AskGalloway, it was inevitable that someone asked: "Have you ever thought of splitting from Dumfries and going solo?"

WE end our toilet tales with Ian Gray in Bearsden musing: "I have maintained for many years that a ladies' toilet is the only place in the world that a 'queue' comes before a 'pee'."

A COLLEAGUE who thinks he has a sense of humour wanders over to tell us: "Next time you're going past a speed camera, flash your lights twice -and watch the driver in front furiously brake thinking he's been caught."