THE death of Lanarkshire businessman and former Hamilton Accies chairman Jan Stepek reminds a reader of a works outing to Hamilton races, and the chaps stopping for a drink in the way home in a Hamilton boozer.

Being peckish after a few beers, one of the crew was dispatched to find somewhere to eat, and he returned to say there was a "steak pie restaurant" across the road.

They decided he needed a trip to Specsavers when they tumbled out of the pub and read the sign across the road which stated Stepek Restorations.

Getting the knowledge

LATER this month is the memorial service in Edinburgh for Clive Fairweather, former second-in-command of the SAS. Peter Drummond remembers him speaking at Kilmarnock Round Table about the Iranian Embassy Siege. Says Peter: "He had been in London for a meeting and, on jumping in the cab to get to the station, was advised in a broad Cockney accent that 'the traffic's murder, Guv, some sort of terrorist trouble'.

"He immediately got the taxi driver to take him there and was the first of the specialist security forces at the scene. When the stunned police officer in charge asked him how he had arrived so quickly he simply winked and said, 'intelligence, sir. The eyes and ears of the SAS are everywhere'."

Horror show

Rangers getting gubbed by Inverness Caley Thistle on Hallowe'en was too much of a coincidence for japesters to ignore. "Did you hear," one tells us, "that Rangers manager Ally McCoist dressed as a pumpkin, in the hope that at midnight he would turn into a coach?"

Snappy line

A GLASGOW reader tells us she held her breath when her young daughter peered keenly into the face of her unmarried aunt and asked: "Why have you so many laughter lines?"

Auntie, though, merely replied: "It must be all the clowns I've dated."

In the bag?

TALES of Scottish words being misunderstood remind John Daly in Houston: "When The Craig shut, there were many steelworkers who took the road south to the steel plant at Port Talbot in South Wales.

"One of my former colleagues who did so was telling me how he had been in a shop buying fruit and how the cashier nearly fell off her chair when he told her he was looking for 'a poke'."

Flagging campaign?

MEMBERS of the Yes Campaign in the Scottish independence referendum feel their opponents are becoming more acrimonious in their claims about independence – so much so that they've dubbed the pro-Union lobby Better Together, with the nickname Bitter Together.

The Yes campaigners are much taken with the fact that the chap holding the Union Fag on the Better Together webpage is holding it upside down – an international sign showing they are in distress.