OUR story about the smoker at the doctor's reminded a Bearsden reader of chatting to his neighbour who smoked at home, as did his wife.

Says our reader: “His wife came home from a visit to the doctor. ‘Bad news,’ she told him. ‘Doctor says I’ve got asthma’.

“‘That’s terrible’, the husband replied. If he wanted to show sympathy, he ruined the effect by adding, ‘That means when I have a fag you’ll have to go out to the garden’.”

Not so bonnie Dundee

FRANCIS Rossi of Status Quo, on a music site which lists bands’ worst gigs ever, proposed Dundee in 1969, where he recalled: “This fight broke out. I’d never seen anything like it – 1500 people, everybody punching everyone else: men punching men, men punching women, women punching men, women punching women – it was like the Wild West.

“Luckily someone told us to get our stuff and get out. We didn’t argue, we just left. We came back in the morning and about 20 washer-women were there in a line, on their knees, scrubbing the blood out of the lovely new parquet floor.”

Worst gig? Folk in Dundee would describe it as a great night out.

A rain check

AN auld fella surveying the weather at a south side bus stop this week, opined: “They call it autumn to distinguish it from summer, when the rain is slightly warmer.”

Monster mistake

A READER watching the BBC Scotland news with the sub-titles on notes that Scottish Tory leadership contender Jackson Carlaw was named on screen as “Jackson Karloff”.

“Surely,” muses our reader, “they weren’t comparing Jackson to the late actor famed for his role as Frankenstein’s monster?”

Business as usual

OH, and all the shenanigans over the Scottish Tories and Scottish Labour’s new leaders, plus the financial goings on at Rangers FC, remind a businessman of the adage: “It is fortunate that things that matter, like business, are run by sensible people, while football and politics keep the idiots busy.”

Charity fronts up

BREAST cancer charity CoppaFeel! is encouraging students at Edinburgh University to be aware of breast cancer by giving their boobs names, and to let the charity know what names they’ve given them.

Harriet Little at the charity tells us one of the favourites so far is a throwback to early children’s television - Pinky and Perky.

Going nowhere

OUR tales of shipyard union meetings remind Ronnie McLaughlin: “In the 1980s I worked for a whisky company in Paisley where we were all called out one day to decide whether to strike. One shop steward wasn’t at all in favour and moved that we all ‘maintain the Quo Vadis’. Everyone agreed funnily enough.”