Celeb silliness

LEGENDARY comedian, Andy Cameron, gets in touch to help in our search to find international celebrities with the most tenuous links to Scotland. He reminds us that before she became famous for her peroxide hair and black eye liner, a certain 60s chanteuse was called… Dusty Springburn. And, who could forget the harmonies of that dulcet-toned duo from the north of Glasgow, Simon and Garthamlock?

Stairway to heaven

SELDOM discussed in Sunday school, the Eleventh Commandment is: “Thou shalt not lie. Unless it gets you out of a really tight spot.” Sandy Ingram, from Glamis, underlines this by relating the true tale of the woman who spied the local minister approaching her house while her curlers were in. Not wanting to meet a man of the cloth in such wanton disarray, she instructed her seven-year-old son to inform the minister she was in Aberdeen. “When will she return?” asked the spiritual leader, on hearing the news. The fiendish fibber responded by yelling up the stairs: “Hey, mither, fan will ye back fae Aiberdeen?”

Overegged

WHEN it comes to fine dining, Scotland is unparalleled, as Joyce Ralston, from Partick, discovered. Entering a cafe, she was confronted by a shady fellow sporting a surly sneer and gimlet eye. In other words, the proprietor. “Ye’ll be wantin’ the egg and chips,” he said. Joyce, not wishing to commit too early to such a relationship, enquired: “What are the options?” To which the suave owner of the bargain-basement bistro muttered: “The choices are, ye can huv the egg and chips, or ye can no huv the egg and chips.”

Cooking the books

ANOTHER tale of well-crafted cuisine. Janet Jefferies’ son moved into a flat, his first time away from home. Phoning mum, he boasted that he was already a skilled chef, having bunged a lasagne in the microwave. “That’s not cooking, it’s heating,” his mother informed him. With a sigh, she confides: “If I bought him a cook book, he’d toss that in the microwave, too.”

Shady request

ON social media, rocker Lenny Kravitz requests help finding a lost pair of vintage sunglasses. “They are incredibly sentimental to me,” he explains. Reader Ted McGarry, is unimpressed. “Old photo albums have sentimental value,” he scoffs. “Not sunglasses.” Ted adds: “I lost a tenner recently. It must have slipped out my pocket. It had sentimental value, too. If any reader spots it, can they please return it to daddy?”

Such a loser

ENDING with a wallop of whimsy, reader Scott Pugh says: “Getting old, I started thinking about all the people I lost along the way. Then I came to the realisation that a career as a tour guide really wasn’t for me.”

Read more: Margaret Thatcher in Scotland, 1975-1983