Wee ennui

From the mouths of babes. Bob Jamieson was babysitting two of his granddaughters. An hour after putting them to bed, Matilda, the youngest, came downstairs saying she couldn't sleep.

''What's the problem – a bad dream?'' asked Bob.

''No,” said Matilda. “It's just life, and the whole concept of it.''

“She’s nine,” a discombobulated Bob tells the Diary. “Have they swapped Janet and John for Jean-Paul Sartre at school?”

Hard to swallow

OUR linguistically-limber readers are providing apt definitions of well known words. “Pizzeria is what you get after a bad Italian meal,” explains John Cochrane.

Tall order

THE Diary’s social anthropologists continue to scour the land, hearing trumpets dutifully screwed into lugholes, as they cunningly attempt to overhear choice snippets of conversation.

Darren Pritchard was in a Glasgow café when he heard a woman chatting to the barista.

“I’ve been trying on dresses for my sister’s wedding,” revealed the woman.

“Nice!” said the barista.

“Not really,” sighed the woman. “One of the dresses was the sort of thing a primary teacher would wear to make an entrance. Another was for someone who’s about to give birth to quadruplets. Then there was one which would have looked alright if I was up on stilts.”

“Not to worry,” said the barista, perhaps not entirely focusing on every nuance of the conversation. “You can probably get stilts on the internet.”

Ditzy dramatist

PLAYFUL playwright David Greig has been mulling over his oeuvre: “I once did a play about Dick Fosbury, it was a flop,” he says. “Then I did one about the Bermuda Triangle, sank without trace. My monologue about Putin bombed and my piece about flightless birds was a turkey. I do, however, have high hopes for my musical about packet powdered potato.”

Clock talk

EXASPERATED reader Alfred Wray says: “The human race has managed to replace the horse and carriage with the motorcar, and smoke signals with the telephone. Isn’t it time we replaced alarm clocks, too? Maybe with something called the Slightly-Less-Alarming Clock, which would gently suggest you wake up in the morning, instead of screeching in your eardrum like a mad mechanical martinet?”

Forward thinking

CHATTING to a pal, reader Rosemarie Smallwood admitted she had endured an exhausting week.

“Never mind,” replied her friend. “Only 245 days until Christmas.”

“I’m not sure if she was numerically accurate,” says Rosemarie. “Though I admire her optimism.”

Tiny toughies

ZOOLOGY correspondent Steve McComish asks: “Why do ants never get ill?”

The answer is, of course: “They have little anty bodies.”

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