What a card

EXCITING week ahead with the Cheltenham Festival starting tomorrow. I quite fancy a few bob on Bellshill in the Gold Cup which a Motherwell chum tells me is the only time he has ever looked forward to seeing Bellshill. I once had a barber who went down to Cheltenham every year and made a fortune. Never went to the races, just stayed sober and played poker in the local hotels afterwards with celebrating punters. As a reader once told us: "I had a few pals around for poker, and I said to the guy who won the most, 'How come you're lucky at cards, but you're so unlucky at picking winners at Cheltenham?' 'I don't get to shuffle the horses,' he replied."

That'll teach him

WE end our tales on how pupils address teachers with Alasdair Sinclair telling us: "Years ago as a probationer teacher at the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh I was chuffed to be addressed regularly as 'Sir' by a chatty mature cleaner. Then one day I was brought down to reality when on listening more attentively I discovered that what she was really calling me was 'Son'."

Strong and tough

AND talking about schools, Brian Collie recalls: "We had two teachers at secondary school - Mr Murphy, who took us boys for athletics, but I think he was a science teacher, and Miss Barr, girls' gym teacher. They got married - probably why the science teacher hung around the gym, now I think of it - and eventually had a baby... christened by the pupils as 'The Murphy Barr Kid'."

Door policy

HE might be the only Glasgow comedian with a double-barrelled surname, but Christopher Macarthur-Boyd has a growing fanbase amongst the punters, and is back at the Glasgow Stand at the end of the month. We remember him once explaining at The Stand his inability to understand racists. As he put it: "I don't understand it on a fundamental level, hating someone because their skin's a different colour. To me there's so many better reasons to hate people. Like if somebody came up to me and said, 'See that guy over there. Him. Aye him. He's one o' they refugees.' I'd be like, 'What are you on about?' but if they said to me, 'See that guy over there. Him. Aye him. He gets on the train before folk are done getting' off' I'd be with them."

A dog's life

GROWING old, continued. Robert Gardner realised he had been around a few years when his young grandchildren asked him what dogs he had owned over the years. Says Robert: "I gave them all the names. A while after one of them came over and gave me a scolding, saying, 'You can't keep swapping your dogs'."

Motherly love

A GLASGOW reader swears he heard a woman in the coffee shop at Waterstones tell her pal: "I'm feeling quite good about myself today. I guess I'll call my mother to get rid of that feeling."

Face off

INSULTS that sometimes need preserving. Berwick Rangers, like many football clubs, have social media accounts to keep fans not at the match updated as the game goes on. Thus during the Berwick Rangers v Cowdenbeath game when both managers exchanged heated words over a sending off, the Berwick Rangers social media account recorded: "Ugly scenes in the dugout as Cowdenbeath’s manager has just told our manager Johnny Harvey to 'take his face for a sh*te'."