On yer bike
ONLY three more days until Christmas.
Which means there’s still another two whole days before you have to start worrying about doing the Christmas shopping.
By Christmas shopping we mean logging on the Amazon website, punching into the search engine "cheap, trashy toys for kids", then ordering the first thing to appear on screen.
Then, on the morning of December 25th, instead of Santa magically appearing, it’s one of those delivery blokes on a motorised bicycle who comes crashing down the chimney.
On the subject of presents, the Diary is, of course, the gift that keeps on giving.
Here’s a selection of classic tales from our archives for you to unwrap and peruse under the Christmas tree…
Up in smoke
A DISCUSSION about health and wealth.
The subject of cigarettes had been raised at the golf club, with one chap declaring to a committed smoker: “So what is it now, eight quid a packet? At a packet a day that’s nearly three grand a year. So over 20 years you could have bought an F-Type Jaguar.”
“Do you smoke?” the smoker replied.
“No,” said the chap.
“So where’s your Jag?” said the smoker.
Flying field
AN apocryphal story from Ayrshire, where we were told about a millionaire businessman who had a helicopter to speed him around his empire.
Having cut the grass on his estate with his ride-on mower, he thought he would blow the cut grass away by hovering over it.
His wife, hearing the noise of the helicopter, opened the door to find out what was going on… and ended up head to foot covered in grass, and with a lawn where the carpet used to be.
Alley-oops
THE Moscow State Circus once visited Braehead. A reader swore to us that the woman next to him at the show was watching the acrobats on the trapeze when she said to her husband: “You’d never catch me doing that.”
“I wouldn’t even try,” he replied.
Talking balls
IN his autobiography, singer Rod Stewart explained the madness of being a Celtic fan.
He was in Vancouver and was heading to a bar at four in the morning to see a Celtic game due to the time difference.
Wrote Rod: “The sun was just coming up, and I saw this bloke on his bicycle, with his cycle clips on, in his hooped Celtic shirt, pedalling determinedly through the empty streets, and I thought, You and me both, pal.’”
Danse macabre
“MY husband had a near-death experience at the weekend,” a woman was heard telling her pals in Glasgow’s west end.
“He tried to change the channel when Strictly Come Dancing was on.”
Giving the needle
A READER got in touch with the Diary to offer good advice.
“Don’t trust acupuncturists,” she warned us. “They always turn out to be backstabbers.”
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