A real beaut

IN 1985 Ken Cameron spent a weekend on Bute. On the Sunday our reader arrived at a hostelry towards the south of the island in what is best described as a state of boisterous liquidity. Conversation with a local worthy produced the observation that our man appeared to be "googled".

Which confirms our long held suspicion that everything, including the Internet’s most famous search engine, was invented in Scotland.

Belt up

THE Diary recently opened its very own detective agency to investigate a curious incident that took place years ago in Paisley’s John Neilson Institution, where an entire primary class of pugnacious pupils were forced to belt each other in pairs. Being an uneven number in class, one child was paired with the teacher.

Helen Wilson gets in touch to further disperse the peasouper fog enveloping the past. She reveals the incident took place in the art room, and it was she who belted the teacher, who also happened to be headmaster.

Helen had been busy with her artwork and not misbehaving (much) so wasn’t initially included in the mass walloping.

The teacher, however, decided that she seemed eager to participate, so invited her to belt him. Though if she missed, he promised it would be six of the best for Helen…

She didn’t miss.

Condemned guys

WITH Bonfire Night approaching, reader Laura Nash muses that Guy Fawkes was executed for attempting to blow up Parliament. She wonders what modern transgression would lead someone to suffer a similar fate.

“Cough within a six-foot radius of another person,” she suggests.

Bonding session

THE late Sean Connery had a martini-dry wit. Comic actor Gavin Mitchell recalls a note left for him at the Citizens Theatre, which read: “My Dearest Gavin, if I ever hear an ymore of your impersonating me you’ll be hearing from my lawyers. Best wishes, Sean Connery.”

Fake chagrin, serious charm. Nobody did it quite like the lad from Fountainbridge. 

Food for thought

“IT’S time to update the vernacular,” argues reader Tim James. “From now on I’m calling TV dinners satellite dishes.”

Bacon not saved

WE recently mentioned that comedian Richard Pulsford is writing a sitcom about broke farmers using an all-terrain vehicle to drive pigs to market. The sitcom title being: Last of the Hummer Swine.

Ken Macintosh from Stirlingshire suggests the pigs in question will be slaughtered by a moonlighting abattoir worker, featured in another TV series: Hams under the Homer.

Daffy doc

COCKAMAMIE comment time. “Is a medic specialising in the Adam’s apple a guyneckcologist?” enquires Phil Curran.

Read more: Those were the days