St Mirren’s latest chapter
CONGRATULATIONS on St Mirren recording their first league win of the season.

As their fan Chris Brookmyre, the award-winning novelist mourned: “I managed to write a novel between St Mirren’s last two league wins.”

Horseplay in Manchester
WE mentioned Levenmouth Police using social media in a humorous fashion.

They are not alone. After this week’s Manchester City v Celtic game, Manchester Police announced: “Celtic fan arrested for throwing a hamburger at a police horse in Piccadilly Gardens. Male started kicking about in the van!”

They later added: “Horse in stable condition.”

The mad dogs of Fife
MIND you, if the polis try to be funny, the public are likely to join in. The aforementioned Levenmouth Police in Fife remarked on social media: “Baltic in Levenmooth the nicht! Far too cold to hing aboot the streets gulping Bucky and Mad Dog!”

However Gary Bouse replied: “Get back to the station then officers – it will take the chill aff yer Bucky.”

Red lights all around
THE Christmas songs are slowly edging their way on to the radio. For those that know their lyrics of Chris Rea’s Driving Home For Christmas, comedy writer Sanjeev Kohli recommends: “Chris. Either 1) Have Christmas dinner at yours this year, or 2) Set off now. Problem solved.”

And talking of Christmas songs, even celebrity couple David and Victoria Beckham’s 11-year-old son Cruz is getting in on the act by releasing his own song “If Everyday was Christmas.”

As radio presenter Scott Hughes witheringly commented: “Mate, your parents are The Beckhams, everyday IS Christmas!”

Spikey reply
SAD to hear of the death of former East Renfrewshire Tory MP Allan Stewart, he of the mutton-chop whiskers. A colleague once went to interview him at his home near Neilston, where the garden was full of stone hedgehogs.

Allan himself was wearing a hedgehog tie and revealed he was a member of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society.

He joked that hedgehogs had never changed over the thousands of years they had been on earth – much like the Tory Party.

Circling around

GETTING to be a busy time of year. A reader in a Byres Road coffee shop heard a woman at the next table tell her friends: “I’m beginning to think the dark circles that appeared under my eyes in 2008 may not go away.”

Fishy tale

THE Herald’s archive picture of the fish van with a wooden fish box reminds David Noble at wholesaler’s Aegirfish in Ayr: “The boxes were highly prized, with the merchant’s name stencilled on the side. It was difficult keeping track of the boxes, as a lot ended up on bonfires or in potting sheds.

“W.A.A Eddie fish-merchants of Glasgow had a fierce reputation for guarding their boxes. I was visiting the Kelvin Hall Transport Museum with its old cobbled street. One shop was a fishmonger’s, and in the window I spied an Eddie box. I couldn’t resist phoning Jim Eddie to tell him I had spotted one of his boxes, and when he asked where, I told him the transport museum.

“Next time I was there it was gone.”

Floats for women

WE mentioned children who think the past was in black and white. Ian Forrest tells us: “I told my kids the world was black and white when I was a wean and that was why old TV programmes weren’t in colour.

They also believed that suffragettes were shouting ‘Votes for swimmin’, and that sand quarries were brown-sugar factories. They grew up okay actually.”