THE DIARY TUESDAY AUGUST 5 2008

There are oft-quoted sayings illustrating something being perfectly obvious which refer to a bear's toilet habits in a wood, and even the Pope's religious affiliation.

A reader on the number 75 to Castlemilk heard a local variation when a chap wearing a baseball cap asked his mate a question to which the answer was obviously, and disparagingly, in the affirmative.

"Is there a queue at Greggs?" his pal replied.

Giving it large
We overhear two women trying a couple of glasses at Pimm's at lunchtime discussing a friend who apparently had put on a bit of weight. "She's a Mark F size," one of the declared.

"What's that?" asked her puzzled pal.

"One up from a marquee," she replied.

Driven to despair
As if he didn't have his troubles to seek, Chancellor Alistair Darling hailed a taxi in London not knowing that the driver was a member of the action group seeking government financial help after their Equitable Life pensions went down the pan.

"When will I get compensation?" the driver asked.

"I'll do what I can," muttered Darling, clearly wishing he was somewhere else.

"It certainly cheered me up," the driver was telling pals afterwards.

Free will
A Glasgow south-sider arrived home unexpectedly the other week and caught a burglar in his house. As he grabbed hold of the chap, whose hands were full of expensive items from the house, he was surprised when the thief asked: "Don't dob me in with the polis."

To encourage this, the burglar added: "If you let me go, I'll slip a hundred quid through your letterbox tomorrow night."

As this had no effect on the aggrieved householder, still holding him in a vice-like grip, the chap tried to clinch it by claiming, even as he held the jewellery box of the householder's wife: "I'm a man of honour; my word is my bond."

Unnacountably, the householder still called the police.

• "I asked the hotel I was staying in for a wake-up call," declared the chap in the pub. "So the next morning the receptionist phoned and told me, You're just wasting your life - do something about it'."

Record breaker
Our story about the Leonard Cohen records being stolen reminds a reader of when he lived in Dundee some years ago and his extensive collection of bootleg tapes by Bob Dylan, pictured, which he had bought for £600, were in his car.

"On leaving my flat one morning, I found my car window smashed," he tells us. "Imagine my joy to find the bootlegs untouched, and my girlfriend's Wet Wet Wet tape the only one missing."

With compliments?
A Renfrewshire reader tells us about visiting a Chinese restaurant locally and receiving a fortune cookie in which was the printed fortune: "You will gain admiration from your pears."

Sadly, she has since walked past her fruitbowl on numerous occasions, but no words of encouragement have come from it.

Less than ecstatic
Over at the Edinburgh Fringe, Canadian Bremner Duthie has already got a few locals' backs up with his musical show Whiskey Bars as it is spelled with an "e", rather than the Scottish spelling of whisky.

Says Bremner: "I've been told in an e-mail that adding e' to the word whisky is like adding Coca-Cola to a single malt - I've seen folks do that in the States, and I agree, it's disgusting - and that if I'm going to do a show in Scotland I should be aware of the correct spelling."

But as Bremner points out, the name comes from a Kurt Weill song, which spells it with an "e", so the name is staying.

But he does promise to drink as much whisky as he can in Edinburgh in atonement.

The generation gap
We are told about a couple whose son went on a gap year, and they didn't get an e-mail from him for nearly two months. To get the point across that he should perhaps stay in touch more often, his dad replied: "Your mum and I enjoyed your last e-mail. Of course, we were much younger then, and more impressionable."