Anger management

The other evening Josh Addison from East Kilbride was in the kitchen chatting with his wife, June, who mentioned that, earlier in the day, she had met up with a close friend who was now, alas, a formerly close friend.

The two women had somehow become embroiled in a fierce argument, leading June’s pal to stomp out the restaurant.

Josh was entirely sympathetic. Yet while making the obligatory consoling noises to his wife, he couldn’t help musing to himself about her choice of words.

For June described her friend as having, “stormed off in high dudgeon.”

Says an intrigued Josh: “I’m now curious to know if anyone, slightly less aggrieved, has stormed out a restaurant in low dudgeon. Or maybe even moderately middling dudgeon…”

Human… or hound?

Movie buff David Donaldson was reading about an American film currently in development.

The script includes a dog called Bark Twain, which sounds suspiciously like that bloke who wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

“Which makes me wonder,” says David, “what other famous people, from all walks of life, could be similarly ‘dogified’.”

For starters, he suggests a presidential pooch who goes by the name of… Bark Obama.

Car-tastrophe

The breakdown blues. Despairing reader Tom Harvey gets in touch to tell us: “My car broke down on the motorway, which almost reduced me to tears.”

Thankfully there’s a glimmer of hope to conclude this tale of woe.

“At least I had a hard shoulder to cry on,” says Tom.

Class warrior

Retired English teacher Beth Anderson was once confronted by an aggrieved pupil who found it exceedingly difficult to understand why he was trapped in a classroom and forced to endure lessons in such a useless subject.

The young scholar expressed his dissatisfaction thus: “How come ye huv tae teach us English, miss? I’ve been speakin’ the lingo for pure yonks.”

Watery wows

A Diary yarn about methods of transport reminds reader Don Marshall of an occasion in the pub, when he boasted to a bunch of pals about a summer jaunt to foreign climes, where he achieved a long-held ambition to swim with dolphins.

One of his pals, not looking especially impressed, merely said: “Dolphins swim all the time. I’d be more impressed if you’d been on a tandem with one of ‘em.”

Scary scran

Time for some seasonal silliness. “What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o-lantern by its diameter?” asks Hallowe’en fan Mark Payne. Almost inevitably, the answer is: Pumpkin Pi.