THE teenage son of Richard Allison, from Giffnock, has reached the age where he can legally enjoy an alcoholic beverage. So a few cans of beer were brought into the house at the weekend, sot Richard could accompany his offspring while the lad sampled his first gargle of the grown-up stuff.
Richard’s son, alas, instantly disgraced himself by going to a drawer in the kitchen, retrieving a pink, striped straw, popping the straw in his can of Stella, then slurping in a slightly less than adult fashion.
“Remind me never to take you to the pub,” said Richard.
Another singular idea
THE Diary continues its latest daft task of depluralising famous movies. John Butler suggests turning the quirky 2001 Wes Anderson movie, The Royal Tenenbaums, into the possibly even quirkier The Royal Onenbaum.
Number crunchers crunched
ONE for the numerically minded amongst our readers. Ben Lowrie gets in touch to say: “Statistically speaking, people who say ‘statistically speaking’ have no statistical data to support their claims.”
Eccentric education
WHEN he was a uni student in the 1980s, Murray Gardner, from Stirling, attended lectures in history, and was fortunate to have a tutor who was intensely charismatic and passionate about communicating ideas.
Sadly, very few of those ideas had anything to do with history, for the tutor had a bad habit of straying off topic without a moment’s notice.
“There was one occasion when he was meant to be providing commentary on the Great War, with an emphasis on the failure of the Schlieffen Plan,” recalls Murray.
“Yet somehow he ended up giving the class his top tips on living a successful and contented life. His central thesis was that happiness would be assured if we managed to dodge everything that begins with the letters y then o.”
Or as the lecturer memorably explained to his astonished class: “Always avoid – as best you can – yoga, yoghurt and yodelling.”
Books so basic
THE 15-year-old grandson of reader Helena Barron obsesses over his phone, and is most often to be found hypnotised by the series of TikTok videos rampaging across its screen.
“Have you never heard of a book?” an exasperated Helena said to him.
“Sure I have,” replied the young chap, without removing his eyes from the screen. “It’s just like my phone, though it only has one app.”
Animal magic
A ZOOLOGICAL enquiry from reader Jennifer Harper, who wants to know: “If you guided a zebra through a supermarket checkout, would you hear a bleep?”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here