Hearse hecklers
LIKE Peter Cushing cracking open a crypt, we return again to our Grim Reaper repository of funeral tales. Robin Gilmour recalls a wedding in Drumchapel years ago. The bride’s car was leaving her house for the church and children surrounded it, as is the custom, waiting for the tsunami of sixpences to descend, tossed gaily from the car windows. A week later a hearse ponderously departed the same street. Two wee boys sprinted after it, yelling exuberantly to the top-hatted driver: “Skuse me! Skuse me, mister! Is it a scatter?”
McQueer behaviour
WITTY and pithy short story writer Chris McQueer has joined The Herald’s sister paper the Evening Times as a columnist. A good excuse to quote Chris reminiscing recently about a youthful confrontation he had with Glasgow’s famed sense of the absurd: “One of the best bits of patter from when I was a wee guy was when I went to the van and asked for a Twirl and the guy did an actual twirl,” Chris recalled. The Diary is now on the hunt for this gifted purveyor of ice-cream cones. Our search begins at the headquarters of Scottish Ballet, where we hope to discover he’s now a principle dancer. (And choc-ice salesman during intermissions.)
Super-duper shopper
WE’VE been pondering what superpowers would come in handy in real-life situations. David Donaldson says he’d like to have the powers of… Supermarket Man. This hero of our times has the near-miraculous ability to instantly locate essential items (unsweetened almond milk, organic free-range eggs, vegan sausages etc.) in any supermarket, even after they’ve been cunningly shuffled around by Supermarket Man’s arch-nemesis, Waitrose Employee Girl.
Light-bulb moment
EDINBURGH singer-songwriter Johnny Lynch, who performs under the pseudonym The Pictish Trail, exhibited very rock and roll behaviour this week on stage in Norwich… though only by accident. Mr Trail (we don’t know him well enough to call him The) was performing in a boiler suit covered in light bulbs. (As you do when you’re a madcap muzo.) In the final moments of his set the bulbs got caught in the mic stand making it crash to the floor. “In order to untangle myself I had to undress down to my boxers and leave the stage,” sighs Mr Trail, who forwards his apologies to the bemused people of Norwich.
Guilt by association
NEIL Forsyth, the scribe who wrote BBC crime drama, Guilt, has devised a crafty marketing campaign to make sure the show’s a hit. On social media he advises: “If you’re enjoying it please spread the word. If not, please keep it to yourself.”
Alarming behaviour
JOKE time. Reader Charles Allen tells us he used to sell security alarms door-to-door. A job which he excelled at. “If no one was home, I would just leave a brochure on the kitchen table,” he says.
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