Chunky chuckles

SIZE doesn’t matter is a refrain you often hear. It does, of course.

If size didn’t matter, animal lovers wouldn’t just keep pet goldfish. They would also have, stuffed in a bowl of water on the mantelshelf, a pet blue whale.

Length matters, too, as Andy Murray knows only too well. This week he participated in a tennis match at the Australian Open that lasted five hours and forty-five minutes. That’s almost as long as the dinosaurs hung around on Planet Earth.

The Diary, of course, prefers teeny-tiny tales to lengthy stories. That’s because levity works best with brevity.

As the following classic yarns from our archives prove, we may be short on words, but when it comes to laughs?

We like ‘em big.

The history man

WE recall Farmer Kelly, the St Mungo’s Academy head of History from years ago, who used to wear a deerstalker hat and a trench coat buttoned to the neck with a sprig of heather pinned on it.

One former pupil said of this memorable chap: “He once belted everyone in my class who had failed the History exam, and then belted the rest of us who had passed, for cheating.”

Red alert

ANOTHER tale of cruelty aimed at innocent youth. The sister of a reader had not been well after the birth of her child, so hadn’t been out much.

The first day she ventured into the fresh air with the baby in the pram, a neighbour glanced in it and said, “Oh, he’s got red hair, is that why you’ve not been going out?”

Mystery man

THE above story inspired another reader to recall the old joke about the conversation overheard on a Glasgow street…

“My, your wean’s got a braw heid of red hair. Does he take after his faither?”

“Ah don’t know, he never took his bunnet aff.”

Footering about

A GLASGOW PE teacher in the 1960s was working in one of the city’s more challenging schools. Taking the boys to the local baths, he told one of those assembled at the side of the pool to take his socks off before getting in.

He then realised hygiene might be a future topic of discussion when the lad replied: “Please sur, ah hiv taken aff ma socks.”

Sound of silence

A CHEF in a leading Glasgow restaurant told us he occasionally has fun with famous people by looking at them quizzically and asking: “River City?”

He added: “The silence is usually deafening.”

Housework sucks

AT Glasgow’s Barras market a reader once heard a trader trying to flog a vacuum cleaner and shouting: “It’ll cut your housework in half, missus.”

The woman he was directing his sales pitch at replied: “I’ll take two, then.”