Baffling brains
LAST summer kindly reader Maureen Collins helped to organise and run a youth outing to the Cairngorms.
The event was a great success, though Maureen found herself bemused by the behaviour of the teenagers in her care, who were often stroppy, huffy, grumpy, over-enthusiastic, underwhelmed, outraged, bored, delighted, dismayed…
And all of these emotions tended to occur at the exact same time.
She was discussing this baffling state of affairs with another adult on the outing, who made this philosophical pronouncement: “You’ve got to remember the teenage brain is a work in progress. It’s like the first draft of a great novel, before you put it through the spellcheck.”
Sound of silence
CHATTING to a chum in the boozer, reader Harvey Bruce mentioned that he had recently lost his voice.
His quick-witted chum replied: “You don’t say?”
Steelwork stealer
THE Diary is celebrating - sorry, that should be castigating - the art of thievery.
Reader Jim Scott tells us the apocryphal tale of the gardener employed to do the landscaping at the grounds of the old Ravenscraig steelworks.
“The security personnel were sure he was up to something,” says Jim. “Each week he tended the flower beds on the front driveway.
“Afterwards the guards would search his wheelbarrow, but all that was there was the broom, shovel and rake.
“When he was off ill, a guard had to deliver his pay slip, and was intrigued to note that all the gardener’s neighbours were delighted with their new wheelbarrows, brooms, shovels and rakes…”
Jocular Jock
ANOTHER tale of a worker being scrutinised.
Back in the 1980s reader John Gilligan was part of the team constructing the Corkerhill railway sheds, where there was a gruff gaffer who went by the name of Wee Jock Weir.
John once arrived 15 minutes late, and apologised profusely.
This seemed to do the trick, for kindly Wee Jock shook his head in a sympathetic manner and said: “Nae need tae apologise, son.”
Though he immediately added: “Yer docked.”
John lost 30p in wages that day. Jock wasn’t jock-ing.
A wee wait
QUIZ time. Reader John Mulholland gets in touch to ask: “When does Q come before P?”
The answer, he uncomfortably discovered is, “at London’s National Gallery’s gents toilets. The longest five minute wait ever.”
Animal tragic
A TALE of wildlife. And how wild it often becomes.
“What do you get if you cross a chicken with a fox?” asks Chris Robertson from Newton Mearns.
The answer, inevitably, is: “A fox.”
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