Sticky situation

FOLK are still talking about THAT speech. As First Minister Nicola Sturgeon's husband Peter Murrell, preparing for next week's SNP conference in Glasgow, cleverly remarked on social media: "Big shout out to the SNP conference team. Let's stock up on some stronger glue. Better sa e than sorry."

Currying favour

IT'S also National Curry Week next week, someone somewhere has decided. We remember when the famous Shish Mahal reopened on Park Road years ago and our old chum Tom Shields pitched up and ordered the karahi lal pari, a Punjabi dish requiring a dash of red wine in its flavoursome sauce. The waiter apologised, and said that as the restaurant was still waiting for its new drinks license from a tardy Glasgow Licensing Board, it could not be made.

An ever resourceful Tom brought a very acceptable Concha y Toro from the nearby off licence and asked the chef to use it in the dish which after much discussion was agreed would not break the licensing laws. Any other favourite curry stories?

Got the brush off

GREAT reviews of the play Faithful Ruslan: The Story of a Guard Dog at Glasgow Citz this week. We still recall a colleague who once told us: "When I finished uni, my first job was as a theatre set painter, but I got sacked. I left without making a scene."

Roll with it

WE mentioned the sharp wit of union boss Rodney Bickerstaff who died this week. John Henderson recalls: "He had a genuine human touch and was one of the few impressively good union barons. I remember his response at one fringe meeting on low pay at a Labour conference in Bournemouth when a local businessman on the panel said to him, 'Rodney, you may have read in the Daily Mail that...' The response from Bick was swift, 'The Daily Mail? Oh I prefer Andrex'."

What a shower

A READER coming out of Cineworld in Glasgow tells us of the chap in front of him who had just left a screening and told the girl with him that he had found some of the film hard to believe. When she asked him what he meant he replied: "Well that bit where he's in a hotel room and immediately knows how the shower works."

Man of few words

WE asked for your postcard stories, and Sue Forsyth in Bearsden says: "Our friend Ronnie from East Kilbride sent us one of those extra large postcards the first time he and his wife visited Hong Kong. On a vast expanse of white card was written, 'EK - HK - OK'."

Cold calling

GOOD day for many of us yesterday, weatherwise, after a shocking couple of days. As Joe Heenan passes on: "Heard someone say, 'Really feels like October now.' You live in Scotland you idiot. It's October all the time."

Struck a chord

A WEST End reader hears a woman gulping pinot grigio at the next table to him in an Ashton Lane bar tell her pals: "Every evening my neighbour's daughter practices piano with what sounds like her face."

An eyeful

A WHITECRAIGS reader asks if teenage girls are perhaps just a little bit over excitable. He only wonders after a girl on his train into town told her pals: "I got shampoo in my eyes this morning. It was so bad I started wondering what I would name my guide dog."