On a roll
PEOPLE have mixed views on whether to use automated tills or wait for a real person in the supermarket. A Partick reader tells us: “At least you can still get banter with an actual server. I went in the other day for some toilet rolls, and the normal pack of nine rolls had three free ones. And in addition there were three packs for the price of two, so loaded with 36 rolls I went to the till.
“As he swiped the three packages the assistant asked me, ‘Curry tonight?’”

Mine of information
MORE golfing euphemisms as a reader recalls when a shot was described as an “Arthur Scargill” – a great strike, but with a poor result.

Not quite below par
TALKING about golf, Bill Lothian tells us about Tino Weeraratna, whose son has played cricket for Scotland, shaking his putter over his head like a cricket bat when coming off the 18th green at Duddingston Golf Club. Says Bill: “Tino explained that every time he scored a 100 at cricket he did that, and since he had just had a three figure score in our monthly medal, he thought it might be appropriate to do likewise.”

Taking things lying down
STILL much talk on going to war with Spain over Gibraltar. As television presenter Richard Osman remarks with tongue in cheek: “If we do go to war with Spain we should attack between two and four in the afternoon.”

Pinching old folk
GROWING old continued. Actress Glenda Jackson remarks in this week’s Radio Times: “Everybody ignores old people, so we could shoplift and burgle till the cows 
come home.”

Just champion
SEEMINGLY football fans in England are not impressed by the quality of football north of the Border. A reader in London tells us he was in his local on Sunday when a toper watching the Sky sports news remarked: “Seeing all the Celtic fans celebrating winning the Scottish Premiership reminds me of the time when I broke out the champagne after beating my six-year-old daughter at arm wrestling.”

Lapping it up
A FINAL encore for stories about Glasgow pantos with 13-letter titles as Christine McLachlan in Milton of Campsie recalls: “About 50 years 
ago my then boyfriend, now my husband, and I went to see the pantomime Dick MacWhitty with John Grieve at the Citizens. John made his entrance walking through the auditorium, and his cat sat down on my boyfriend’s knee. John called out, ‘Get up aff that man’s knee! You don’t know where he’s been.’ Alastair was mortified.”

Cables crossed
THE Nevis Range ski resort, with its cable car, will be 30 years old next year. John Rose in Fort William tells us that the company behind it ordered 3,000 pencils as souvenirs with a picture of the cable car gondola printed on them. When the order was delivered they discovered they had been sent 3,000 pencils with Venetian gondolas. Not such a good souvenir then.