TOUGH gig, being an actor and comedian. As Darren Connell, who plays the police-pestering Bobby on the BBC Scotland series Scot Squad, revealed yesterday: "Someone just asked me while I was in my local Asda buying hummus, 'Can you paint my fence for me? I know you do comedy stuff, so won’t get much work'. So if my body gets found buried in someone’s garden it’s cause I was painting a Random’s fence."

OUR tales of taking your own food into work remind John Milligan in Kilmarnock: "As a young fireman in the 1970s, when acting as kitchen assistant to an older, worldly-wise fireman in Kilmarnock Fire Station, the cook discovered he was one fish short for a fish and chips lunch. It didn't take long for him to stave off a potential mutiny. He produced a piece of white bread, cut off the crusts and shaped it to look like a fish fillet. With breadcrumbs applied it was deep fried along with the others and put out for lunch. The strange thing was, there were no complaints!"

A GLASGOW reader heard an auld fella on his bus into town discussing with his pal the current fashion to have tattoos, and he came out with the memorable line: "I mean, when I was young you could make out what they were – a heart or a flower or something. But now some o' they young folks' arms look like the inside of your old school desk's lid."

IT can be a deeply divided world. Glasgow criminal lawyer Ryan Sloan passes on: "At the Turnberry Hotel, and I’ve just had to apply for finance to buy a chicken burger – and a 17-year-old boy just pulled up in a yellow Lamborghini."

THE American television series The Bachelor, whereby an eligible young chap is introduced to a number of potential mates over a number of weeks, has been recreated in countries around the world. An expat in Australia tells us about the local version where a trailer has just been shown on the telly for the new series. It showed a handsome young man standing in the centre of a garden and a fetching young woman in a long blue dress coming up to meet him. "I'm an astrophysicist," he says, as way of an introduction. She pauses, smiles, says "OK" and adds: "I'm a gemini."

WE know a few of you will identify with this as a Whitecraigs reader sends us a new take on a very old joke. He tells us: "The chicken crossed the road for the same reason everyone else does – to avoid running into someone it knew."

GROWING old, continued. Says a Woodside reader: "Childhood injuries: Fell off my bike, fell out of a tree, twisted my ankle. Adult injuries: Slept wrong, sat down too long, sneezed too hard."

TODAY'S piece of daftness comes from a Partick reader who tells us about a very upmarket restaurant he recently dined in and finished his peroration with: "It was so posh that at the end of the meal I felt I had to ask for the William."