Cutting remark

A READER tells us he knew he was in a Glasgow barber shop when he entered, saw four of the six chairs were occupied, and not wishing to skip ahead of the queue, asked a chap studying the racing page of a newspaper: "Who is last?" Without looking up he replied: "You are."

Glass act

OUR tales of purloined pub glasses remind Russell Duncan: "In the sixties, many student flats in Glasgow proudly displayed glasses showing the stag logo of the Ormidale Hotel on Arran. The late proprietor Fisher Gilmore was aware that a resident had appropriated a lot of the glasses and had departed the hotel with them in a duffel bag. Fisher went down to the pier where the offender was standing in the queue for the boat and gave the bag an almighty kick, which resulted in the sound of breaking glass and Fisher saying to the astonished culprit, 'I don’t think these will be much use to you now'."

Let it roll

BURNS Suppers, continued. Jim McGovern in Dundee tells us: "At a Dundee Labour Party Burns Supper Jake McDonough was delivering the Address to the Haggis but the haggis had not turned up and instead there were large platters of sausage rolls. Undeterred, Jake stood up with a sausage roll on a paper plate before him and commenced, 'Fair fa’ yer honest pastry case, great chieftain o’ the flaky race' and continued off the cuff right to the end and got a standing ovation."

Sinking feeling

WE mentioned words having different meanings in Scotland, and Kate Gordon in Renfrewshire asks: "Is it just me or does anyone else smile when they see the television advert for Harry Corry's Dandelion bed-set, complete with a pattern of dandelions that we knew as youngsters as pee-the-beds?" And just to add to the confusion, it was not just a Scottish thing it seems as the French word for dandelion is "pissenlit" with "en lit" of course meaning "in bed".

It clicks

MORE on growing old as a Newton Mearns reader tells us: "Did you know that everything really starts to click when you hit your Sixties? Knees, back, elbows... everything."

Pull the wool

THE Sandra Bullock horror film Bird Box has led to young folk doing copycat dares where they try to do complicated tasks while wearing blindfolds. John Henderson wonders if that explains Theresa May's Brexit strategy.

Rings a bell

WE mentioned BBC Scotland's former head of radio, Jeff Zycinski's biography The Red Light Zone. It mentions a visit by Princess Anne to a charity in Govan where Jeff and other guests were instructed not to speak to the Princess Royal unless spoken to first. A group of guests were standing in silence wondering what to do when Princess Anne broke the silence with an innocuous question about transport links to Govan. Everyone was so relieved that there was a hurried discussion about bus routes and whether or not the 34 or the 34A was the best service to take, but as Jeff says: "However, there was no sign of Her Royal Highness taking notes for future reference."

Canvassing opinion

TODAY'S piece of whimsy comes from Tony Cowards who declares: "Just having a vote on whether Picasso was the best portrait artist of all time.

"So, eyes to the right, nose to the left."