Winging it

SO what's your best excuse for turning up late? There was a luvvie get together at Sarti’s Italian restaurant on Glasgow's Renfield Street with some Royal Conservatoire of Scotland former and current staff having a catch up. Alison Forsyth, former director of Bafta Scotland, and the first director of the Scottish Drama Training Network, was unusually late causing her fellow luvvies some angst. After 40 minutes Alison burst through the door of the restaurant with the memorable words: "A seagull shat in my handbag”.

Can anyone better that?

Black mark

THE stress of being a teenager. A reader heard his daughter look up from her mobile phone and state: "Some people have written 'Happy Birthday' on my timeline without any exclamation marks. It's as if they don't even care."

Hand it to her

WE mentioned the 30th anniversary this week of the opening of the Glasgow Garden Festival, and Margaret Thomson recalls: "A friend of mature years visited the festival, and decided she had to go on the Coca Cola ride. When she landed, we asked how she had enjoyed it. 'Well,' she said, 'It was ok, but I had one hand clapped over my eyes to keep my specs on, and the other over my mouth to keep my teeth in, so I didn't see much'."

Any more memories?

Toothy problem

AND talking of false teeth - as we do sometimes in The Diary - an East Kilbride reader tells us that when he worked in a Coatbridge bar years ago a regular came in and said he had been kept in the local police station overnight after a small misdemeanour. When he was allowed to go, and handed his belongings, he noticed he had lost his false teeth, and asked where they were. Says our reader: "The desk sergeant rummaged below the desk and came up with a box containing a large number of sets of false teeth and told him, 'Take your pick'. My customer had a look, but decided just to leave it."

Bit flushed

OUR toilet tales cannot pass without at least one mention of these complicated train toilets. As broadcaster Gyles Brandreth once related after a visit to Yorkshire: "So I was outside the WC, pressed the button, the door opened and a poor sod inside turned frantically towards me, unable to staunch his flow. As he waved his arms in alarm turning hither and yon, his spray went everywhere. 'Shut the door!' he cried as his trousers fell to his ankles. Then I pressed the button on the outside just as he pressed the button on the inside, so the closing door reopened - that's when he slipped."

Bank on it

PROBLEMS for TSB account holders trying to access their cash on-line after a new IT system was installed, have been making the headlines. As customer John Henderson tells us: "Still frozen out of my TSB account to check the level of my overdraft. Suggested new slogan for TSB: 'The bank that likes to put the S and H into IT'."

Baby talk

GRANDCHILDREN, continued. A reader attending her grand-daughter's second birthday tells us that the little four-year-old boy from up the street was making a lot of fuss over the birthday girl. The boy's mother simpered: "Perhaps they'll get married when they're older." Our reader couldn't resist replying: "I doubt she'll want to marry someone twice her age."

Pregnant pause

AS the Royal Baby fever subsides, we pass on the observation from Canadian sports commentator Dan O'Toole: "Wait...she had the Royal Baby, walked out and showed it to everyone, then went home?! I had fast food yesterday and couldn’t leave the couch."