RUSSELL LEADBETTER
THE sad news of the passing of Jack Warden, sometime political correspondent of this very paper, reminded us of an era when Glasgow was the birthplace of many larger-than-life journalists.
One such was Jack Webster (no, not that one) who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War and went on to become a broadcast legend there.
When he died in 1999, an obituary noted that one of his many interviewees had included Pierre Trudeau, 'the less-than-universally' loved Prime Minister.
"Jack, I'll make you a deal," Trudeau once told him. "You and I retire together, OK? When you get out of this game, I'll get out."
Quick as a flash, Jack responded: "How about tomorrow?"
Trudeau, added the obituary, changed his mind.
YOU may have read recently about the Ayrshire newlyweds whose car broke down on the way to their reception and who ended up getting a lift in a police car. When Police Scotland and Ayrshire Police Division posted the story on their Facebook pages, members of the public reacted with praise, as was only right. One tongue-in-cheek comment, however, stands out: "I thought all Ayrshire weddings ended up with happy couple in the back of a police car."
THE weather has improved, if only temporarily. Muriel Gray tweeted yesterday: "Good people of temporarily dry Glasgow, please send bids if you would like to stop me hanging out washing, which will instantly reboot rain."
SPEAKING of the weather, reader Liam Chalmers was in Edinburgh's Princes Street a few days ago. Tourists were scurrying by in the pouring rain and trying to stop their brollies from being blown inside out .... but there in the square outside the National Galleries were two vans trying to sell ice-cream. Can Diary readers think of other textbook examples of optimism?
CLASSROOM tales, more of. This one from David McCall:
A teacher is giving an English lesson and asks her class to write a sentence with the word 'frugal' in it.
No-one knows the meaning so she explains that if one is frugal with one's money, one saves.
Thus it came about that one little boy wrote: "The maid was locked up in the tower when she saw a knight riding past. She shouted out the window, 'Please, good knight, frugal me!'
"So he climbed up the tower and frugalled her."
THEN there's this, from Nigel Dewar:
A teacher asks her primary class to say something funny. Six-year-old Mary’s hand shoots up. “I’m pregnant” she declares.
Teacher: “Mary, that’s awful. Whatever made you think that is funny?”
“Well, Mummy said that when she came down to breakfast this morning and Daddy said 'That’s funny...'"
STILL the put-downs continue.
Chris Ide submits a possibly apocryphal excerpt from one officer's annual confidential report, which read: "I could never warm to this officer, even if we were to be cremated together."
Andy Mitchell, meanwhile, recalls dropping, and breaking, a mercury thermometer at school and earning a rebuke from the chemistry teacher - "If brains were dynamite you wouldn't have enough to blow your nose."
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