Poem is pants

EVER wondered why schoolchildren invariably complete their homework late? It’s because they’re too busy focusing their cunning little minds on becoming rascally versions of Robert Burns.

Our readers have been recalling the scandalous songs they devised during their misspent youth, with one contributor sharing a racy interpretation of the old Pepsodent jingle.

Inspired by this, another reader recalls a variant of the same verse that was chanted by the bawdy scamps of her acquaintance:

“You’ll wonder where your knickers went,

When your elastic bursts by accident.”

Theory of evolution

WE continue to recall the advent of decimalisation, which received an exceedingly warm welcome in Scotland.

Bill Dalgleish from Sanquhar worked in the carpet trade at the time, where it had become law to promote goods in yards and metres, to avoid confusion.

"Whit's they twa prices fur, son?” Bill recalls a customer enquiring.

He launched into an explanation, only to be met with the outraged retort: "A'm no wantin yer new fangled metres, son. A want it by the yaird.”

Bill, realising that evolution is often preferable to revolution, gave it by the yaird.

Lack of foursight

WE recently revealed that eBay has no knowledge of a place that some of our readers may have heard of called Glasgow, and is instead labelling the city’s location as somewhere just outside Edinburgh.

A Cellardyke reader has spotted a similar problem with Apple Maps, who have labelled a street in his home town as East Fourth Street. Which sounds very hip and New Yorkish, though the street in question happens to run alongside the Firth of Forth…

Animal tragic

A ZOO-BASED tale in the Diary reminds David Russell from Penicuik of a joke he proudly promotes as the worst gag ever. (He heard it from a chap feeding the animals at Glasgow Zoo years ago, so we’ll blame him instead of David.)

"Why do polar bears prefer Glasgow Zoo to Edinburgh Zoo?"

"Because its a Calderpark."

Food for thought

IT’S almost a year since the first lockdown, and Norrie Johnstone has one bitter regret about his actions preceding the momentous event: “Had I known in March that it was the last time I’d be in a restaurant I would have ordered dessert.”

Learned thought

WE continue providing alternative meanings for well known locations. David Donaldson suggests: Torridon = A right-wing academic.

Life science

“NASA landed a rover on Mars to search for signs of life,” says reader Andy Miller. “Hopefully they’ll land a similar vehicle in the landscape between Boris Johnson’s ears.”

Read more: Remember when...