Star gazing

SIR Roger Penrose, who has received this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, has posited a theory that a different universe existed before the current one. This should come as no surprise. We live in an age where movies are constantly remade using younger actors, bigger budgets and more impressive special effects. Is it surprising that our own existence may have started in a similar manner? Not with the Big Bang, but the Big Boot – as in reboot.

The Diary is also familiar with the concept of a previous universe, for we are in possession of a glittering firmament of classic tales, which we occasionally peruse, as we do today.

This older universe is very much like our own, being an extremely silly place, filled with extremely silly people. Such as the reader who once informed us his favourite song was ‘Mairi’s Sweating’.

Home time?

A READER sympathised with the middle-aged father shopping in a Glasgow record store with his teenage daughter. She interrupted his story about going to a Rod Stewart concert in his youth, so he asked: “Have I told you this before?”

“So many times,” his daughter replied, “I can’t believe you’re not in a nursing home.”

Mind your language

WE recall the classic story of the granddaughter out in the country with her gran, who suddenly said: “Look at all these coos!”

Gran, keen to improve her charge’s diction, told the little one: “Not coos – cows.”

The young girl thought about this before replying: “Well they look like coos to me.”

Nutty question

THE popular humourist Ed Byrne got into the entertainment business by running comedy nights in his local pub in Glasgow, when he was a student in the city. An interviewer once asked him: “In a nutshell, how did you become a comedian?”

Ed replied: “I didn’t do it in a nutshell. It’s very hard to perform comedy in a nutshell. Atmosphere is very important. I find theatres to be far better places to do it.”

Shop strop

ONE of our correspondents once told us he got a bit disoriented in a large Glasgow store and had to ask a dour-looking security guard where the exit was. “Are you trying to get out of here?” the chap asked.

When our reader answered in the affirmative, the security guard pointed towards the exit and told him: “So am I.”

Foot in mouth

A READER having his shower room fixed was told by the chap from Clean Tile and Grout Scotland that an elderly gentleman had come up to the firm’s stall at the Ideal Home Show in Glasgow and asked if they could help with a fungal infection.

When the company rep asked where it was, the chap said it was in his left toe.

There was confusion all round until the elderly chap pointed at the company sign and said: “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it said gout.”

Cheapy-crawly

A WEST-END reader swears he heard a teenager tell his pal that he saw a tarantula spider on sale in a pet shop for forty quid. His pal replied: “You’ll get it cheaper off the web.”