Burning love

IT was a travesty for Scotland’s culture when Glasgow School of Art’s iconic Mackintosh building burned down in 2018, four years after a previous fire. A Scottish Fire and Rescue Service report published this week admitted the cause of the second conflagration may never be known.

Proof that we Scots can extricate humour from the burning embers of even the grimmest of news, Stevie Campbell from Hamilton tells us: “I'm hearing a rumour that the dating app Tinder is considering setting up their HQ in the Mackintosh building when it finally reopens as it’s renowned for old flames meeting there.”

Hot stuff

OUR observant readers are on the look out for workers whose names perfectly fit their jobs.

“The other day we suffered the catastrophe of a winter boiler failure,” says Larry Cheyne. “The engineer who came to our rescue was the appropriately named Paul Heaton.”

Rhyme time

FRUSTRATED Ian Noble from Carstairs Village cringes when he hears people mispronounce the name of a certain famous song by Robert Burns. Prior to this week’s Burns Night he even heard a BBC Scotland newsreader give it an almichty mangling.

To keep culprits on the straight and narrow, Ian suggests would-be reciters should study the following Allan Sherman poem before opening their mouths…

"There was a man called Lang, my friend

and he had a neon sign

and this man Lang was very old

So they called it ‘Auld Lang’s Sign’".

An absolute banger

A DIARY tale about a reader who misheard the song lyrics of the Queen hit Bohemian Rhapsody reminds reader Brendan Keenan of his niece, who did likewise.

For years she believed the words "Spare him his life from this monstrosity" were actually "Spare him his life from lorne sausages".

(For some unfathomable reason the editor of the Diary views this as a vast improvement on the original.)

Doggone it

WE’RE celebrating exotic terminology used when playing either golf or bowls. John Petrie from East Kilbride tells us a bowl which is delivered much too wide to be of any use may result in the following derisory shout from a rival competitor: "You'll need a collie dug to bring that yin in!"

Belly ache

THE Diary likes to occasionally improve the English Dictionary by adding definitions that don’t currently appear in it.

Reader Jim Hamilton suggests: Abdicate: To give up hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Dead funny

WE end with a grim gag. “A pun walks into a room and kills 10 people,” says reader Owen Richardson. “Pun in, ten dead.”

Read more: Meme of the Day