OUR mention of folk's obsession with their mobile phones reminds Dan Edgar on Rothesay of driving to England before Christmas and stopping in a motorway service station where he went to use the loo. He noticed that the chap standing at the next urinal was texting at the same time. Dan thought he should hurry up and leave when he realised the chap was using both hands to text.

MOHAMMAD Sarwar, Britain’s first Muslim MP, who built up a multi-million pound cash-and-carry business in Glasgow tells in his just published autobiography, My Remarkable Journey, that his first shop on Maryhill Road was plagued with rats. He was on the verge of giving up as the rats were destroying so much stock at night. As Sarwar colourfully put it: "They wreaked terrible destruction – bread,

milk, biscuits and chocolate were all set upon. They were even capable of getting the plastic tops off lemonade bottles – presumably so they could have a drink to wash down the chocolate biscuits."

The solution was a customer who spent six nights building a brick wall inside the existing wall. Ever since he has been nicknamed by Sarwar as the Pied Piper of Maryhill.

THE Turner Prize exhibition closes this weekend at Glasgow's Tramway. It includes a series of fur coats draped over chairs, and the other day a gallery assistant had to tell two pensioners who sat down on the chairs that they couldn't do that because they were works of art. Said the assistant: "They looked at me and said, 'Well, they don’t look like art to us'."

LOTS of newspapers have been quoting readers about their encounters with recently deceased music star David Bowie - gosh we've been doing it ourselves in The Diary. But prize for the most tenuous must go to the Croydon Advertiser which this week reported: "The Coulsdon man who delivered David Bowie's milk during the summer of '69 remembers the music legend as a 'nice man' who 'had time for people'."

A READER swears to us that he was on the Underground in London when he heard a posh local woman complain about the difficulties her daughter was encountering at school. She told her friend: "The new class has filled with girls from Japan. Standards have unfairly risen.”

IT'S the second week back at work for most folk after the Christmas/New Year break. As one Glasgow office worker told us: "Not saying it's slow at work, but a few of us have been trying to remember the synopsis of every Rocky film."

THE Herald reported that islanders on Mull are claiming that the unreliability of their ferry to the mainland has reached crisis point. Reader Bruce Skivington explains to us: "It is being renamed 'The Limpet'

due to its inability to let go of the pier."

A COLLEAGUE haunts our desk in order to tell us: “ I bought my friends an elephant for their room.

“They said thank you. I said, don’t mention it.”