Red-faced over love

VALENTINE'S Day tomorrow, and Moira Campbell tells us: "In my first teaching post, I caught a pupil, who went by the name of Big Josie, passing a note. She was mortified when I read the following verse which she had composed:

"The apples are ripe and ready for pinchin', and I'm fourteen and ready for winchin'."

Bouncing off the wall

MUCH debate on who should be the next manager of Rangers. Graeme Stewart comes up with the surprising suggestion of Donald Trump, and imagines The Donald at his first press conference: "We're gonna build a big beautiful wall, along the halfway line, and we're gonna make Celtic pay for it! They got some bad people there, and we gotta keep them out!"

Gull in the fast lane

OUR stories of seagulls remind Norrie Christie: "Music hall singer Mal Hollander was driving me from Aberdeen to Glasgow in the late sixties, and cars going in the opposite direction were flashing their lights and drivers were waving at Mal. When I drew his attention to this he brushed it aside by saying, 'I'm pretty well known up here - people recognise me'.

"However further south, driving slowly through Perth, I noticed the car's reflection in a shop window and spread-eagled across Mal's roof-rack was a badly stunned seagull."

Sting in the tale

A READER on a south side train into Glasgow last week heard a young woman tell her pal that a workmate in her office was very competitive. As she put it: "She's the kind of person if I told her she was the Queen Bee in the office she would demand to know who was the Queen A."

Team-mates green with envy

WE got all nostalgic last week about sporting goods company Greaves closing its Sauchiehall Street branch. As Matt Vallance in Ayrshire reminisced: "Back in the sixties when the shop was still Lumley's, my cousin, the late Allan Ross, who still holds the Carlisle United appearance record, was an amateur playing with Petershill.

"The Peasie won everything but the Scottish Junior Cup that season and the players were all on a good bonus at the end. Of course being an amateur, Allan couldn't take the money so he negotiated a deal whereby he could go into Lumley's and buy a set of golf clubs, since he was a keen golfer.

"The salesman was a Petershill supporter, and the set of clubs plus the bag was worth twice the cash bonus the other players got. Allan got great use of them during his long career with Carlisle."

Food for thought

IT'S terrible when even colleagues make fun of the Scottish diet. "I've got an exam question for you," bellows a fellow journalist with too much time on his hands. "If Tracey buys three apples, two oranges and a banana, how far south of Scotland is she?"

Grate duo

EVEN Harry Potter writer JK Rowling has been slagging off TV presenter Piers Morgan for always sucking up to Donald Trump. 

Tartan barmy

WE have enjoyed resurrecting the words of self-styled "World's worst poet" Walter McCorrisken. Just a final one:

"She wore a tartan tammy,

And a tartan skirt brand new,

And because she sat too near the fire,

Her legs were tartan too."