Cutting remark

THOUSANDS enjoyed the final two concerts by Runrig held below Stirling Castle at the weekend. We just pass on the comment by Gaelic broadcaster Darren Laing who revealed: "Pal from North Uist told me, 'Runrig have lost touch with their roots. Shouldn’t be having a final gig at silage time!'"

Paper over

WE asked about moments that could only happen in Glasgow and Norma McGovern in Dundee tells us: "A few years ago, I was shopping in Buchanan Street. There was a card shop called Papyrus near to the Donald Dewar statue. An irate husband, who was getting fed up being hauled around the shops with his wife, declared, 'I’ve had enough of this shopping malarkey. I’m off to the pub'. And pointing to the card shop said, 'I’ll meet you outside Papy R Us in an hour'. He must have been absent from school when the ancient art of Egyptian paper making was being discussed."

Maria!

CRIME writer Ian Rankin, at the Edinburgh Book Festival chatting about his latest Rebus novel, In a House of Lies, mentioned how fanatical his fans are about fact checking his books. In the early days, he’d described Rebus’s favourite Edinburgh pub, The Oxford Bar, as having a foot rail. Sais Ian: “I’d misremembered, so Harry, the owner, has now installed a foot rail, just to save me the bluffing.”

Ian also harked back to the boozy heyday of Scottish policing. “When I started drinking at the Oxford it was full of cops. There would be a black police van waiting for them, and at the end of the night they’d all stumble into it and be taken home. Once or twice I got taken home too – but I never said where I lived, so I’d often end up in Leith when I wanted to get to Marchmont.”

Esprit de l'escalier

READER Sandra Durning, in Muscat, was in a local hotel listening to a keep-fit fanatic drone on about his training regime. "I run up the stairs to the first floor, then down again; then up to the second floor and down again, and so on until I've run up and down all six floors." Knowing her own occasional trip up the stairs and wondering what she had gone up for, Sandra sweetly asked: "What are you in training for? Alzheimer's?"

In a flap

THANKS to social media we are told by a young female Celtic fan in Alloa: "Boy in the pub was telling me his job is a penguin erector. So every time a plane flys over Edinburgh Zoo the penguins can’t take their eyes off it and end up falling over, then he just goes round picking them back up, 38 penguins 200 flights a day." Good to know that young Scottish men are still telling porkies to girls in pubs.

Man or mouse

EMBARRASSING moments, continued. Says Willie Mclean in Dumbarton: "I was 22 when I joined the City of Glasgow Police in 1950. I finished my training and was posted to Gorbals. In these far off days we checked shops and business premises were secure. I was with my mentor on the night shift in Norfolk Street. There were two pubs with a close between them. The old cop told me to check the back of the pubs through the close. I walked through quite nonchalantly but on shining my torch on the barred windows I was astonished to see that every window was filled by rats. Hundreds of them. I scampered back through the close to be met with the whole shift, about 20 cops, laughing at me. My sergeant had a stop watch and said,'Not bad, 13 seconds'."