I remember mammy

CRIME novelist Liam McIlvanney recently asked when a "shy" in Scottish football became the more prosaic "throw-in".

Which inspires comedian Andy Cameron to wax lyrical about the grand old days of street footy, when scabby-kneed street urchins would ricochet through the backstreets, blootering a busted old bladder.

“Nae goalposts,” sighs Andy, blissfully. “Just two jaikets at either end.”

Revving up his romantic reverie, the comedy legend adds: “Rules were simpler, too. If it was twenty each, and looking like there wouldn’t be another goal, the match would be decided when whoever supplied the baw was shouted in for his tea by his irate mammy from the touch line.”

Water palaver

THE Diary continues to mangle our readers’ minds with memorable malapropisms. Tom Law recalls a boss being nonplussed by his company’s decision to bend organisational rules.

This miffed manager reckoned his firm was: “Skating on thin water.”

Having it large

A RAKISH reader who admits to being both a keen bibliophile and a boozer recently informed us that he belongs to a book club that satisfies both his primal urges, for club members read such literary treasures as Tequila Mockingbird.

Diary correspondent Jim Grove suggests the club should also read that famous children’s novel about statuesque, muscular ladies who enjoy a tipple.

The book, of course, is… Swallies and Amazons.

Hair-raising tale

“I ASKED my hairdresser if she’d ever given a henna rinse,” says reader Anne Caulfield. “She said no, but she had bathed her pet dog.”

Highland fling

LOTTIE Fyfe, an editor for a London publisher, is in a Mills & Boonish mood, revealing that she has retreated to the “Wild Highlands”, and plans on taking her cat to the vet. “If every romantic novel ever is anything to go by, I expect to meet a devastatingly attractive man, unattached and haunted by a darkly tragic yet unsinister past,” lilts Lottie, (perhaps a tad optimistically).

Fashionable faces

WE’RE musing about what to do with unused disposable facemasks, now masking rules have been eased.

A Paisley teacher informs us that pupils in her school still wear them in class. The reason being that the slivers of cloth have become quite the fashion item, adored by teen trendsetters.

“Kids don’t wear them over their mouths, just below the jawline,” adds the perplexed teacher, “like little chin hammocks. It’s bizarre, though I suppose youth fashion always is. In my day it was legwarmers.”

Mysterious metropolis

“EVERYONE knows where the Big Apple is,” points out reader Jason Cook. “Less people know where Minneapolis.”