The Herald Diary

by Ken Smith

  WE mentioned conversations about what you do for a living, and Bob Byiers recalls: “A young chap, many years ago, who worked in the whisky industry, was on a night out at the dancin’ when his partner of the moment asked him what he did. ‘I work in a bond,’ he replied. Clearly impressed, the young lady then asked, ‘Oh, what instrument do you play?’”

  TERRIBLE news about M&S planning to close 100 stores. As a former member of staff bitterly emails us: “Lovingly wrapped. In a creamy white envelope. With gorgeously detailed fine gold writing. And a first-class stamp. This isn’t just any P45. This is an M&S P45.”

  OUR tales of being tardy at work remind Duncan Shaw in Kilwinning: “Back in the seventies when Glasgow Corporation had a bus works in Victoria Road I was walking across the yard on my way into work one morning in the company of an older workmate. It has to be said this was some time after when we should have clocked in. We were joined by the boss, whose only comment, as it turned out, was, ‘Late!’ Without so much as a sideways glance my friend’s response was, ‘So are we.’ End of conversation.”

  WE have never had anything but excellent service from staff when we have visited, so we are conflicted when a reader emails The Diary: “My student son is playing the world’s biggest game of hide and seek – he’s got a job as a member of staff at B&Q.”

  OUR tales of excuses for being late remind Gerry MacKenzie:“When Strathclyde Police was formed, a young cop from Oban transferred to Glasgow and acquired digs with a ‘polis-approved’ landlady. One bitter winter morning he was well late for work and told the gnarled old sergeant it was so cold in his tiny bedsit he left his electric blanket on. It used up all the coins in his electricity meter and rendered his electric alarm clock unpowered and useless. The sergeant stared directly at him for ages, shook his head and said, ‘Aye, OK.’”

  SO what’s your best excuse for being late? There was a luvvie get-together at Sarti’s Italian restaurant in Glasgow’s Renfield Street for some Royal Conservatoire of Scotland former and current staff.

  Alison Forsyth, former director of BAFTA Scotland, and the first director of the Scottish Drama Training Network, was unusually late. After 40 minutes Alison burst through the door with the memorable words: “A seagull s*** in my handbag.”

  ADA McDonald writes: “There may be an age limit to the stories you like to use in the Diary,” and we reassure her that no, there is not. Anyway, it was our story about a secretary typing on a manual typewriter that reminded her of her aunt, a secretary with the Scottish Co-op Wholesale Society, who once told her of walking to work when she heard a window in the tenement she was passing being raised, and the agitated woman inside shouting down to her husband the unforgettable line: “Wullie! Wullie! Ye’re away wi’ the wrang teeth!”

  A GLASGOW reader emails: “A colleague has retired after nearly 30 years with our company and the management were making a big thing about how she never took a day off sick. They called her dedicated.

  “We always just called her the woman who kept on giving us all the flu.”

  OUR apprentice stories remind Alan Kerr in Tillicoultry: “When I was a student apprentice in Babcock & Wilcox, I was sitting in the work’s canteen at lunchtime listening keenly to all the chat of the men at the table. With some few minutes remaining before the horn summoned us back to work, I stood up, leaving some food still on my plate. ‘Where ur ye guan, son?’ I was asked. ‘No hungry?’

  “I replied, ‘It’s not that. I need to go to the toilet before I go back.’

  “‘Sit doon and finish your dinner,’ I was commanded. ‘Just you remember – we eat and drink in oor time, but pee in theirs.’”

  SCOTTISH Apprenticeship Week just now and Jim Allan in Cellardyke recalls: “I worked temporarily for MacDonald Aircraft near Kinross, where my apprentice wage just covered my digs, and I was horrified when the foreman told me on pay day, ‘We a’ pit hawf-a-croon a week intae a sweep an’ whaever’s clock number comes up wins the pot. So, see’s yer money.’ Very reluctantly I handed over my two-and-six, leaving me with less than £2 towards my rent. The clock number was drawn and, to my delight, it was mine. Over three weeks’ wages in one fell swoop. Next Friday the foreman demanded my money again and amazingly I won again. The following week he told me there had been a decision that temporary apprentices were no longer eligible.”

  A GLASGOW reader swears to us that a young lad in his local was telling his pals about a recent job interview, and he told them: “The guy doing the interview looked at the form I’d filled in and said I was asking for quite a high salary considering I had no experience in their line of work. I explained that was because the work is much harder when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  And we don’t believe the reader who claimed: “I went for a job as an Argos delivery driver. Turned up three hours late for the interview and they said, ‘Congratulations, you qualify for the job.’”

  CROMAR’S in St Andrews has been named Scotland’s best fish and chip shop for the second year running. We always liked owner Colin Cromar’s explanation of how he got into the business. “I fancied a girl who worked in the Anstruther Fish Bar. I thought I would get a job there myself and ask her out. Twenty years later I was still working there.”

  OUR apprentice stories have suggested they are a gullible lot so we should end with a tale showing they were not that daft. Stuart Roberts in Switzerland remembers his apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce in Hillington when the apprentices “would use the lathe to turn out 10p-sized metal discs so we could get drinks out the machine”.

  A NEWSPAPER article about the 35th anniversary of the death of fighter ace Douglas Bader, who flew with artificial legs, reminds our old photographic chum John Young of when legendary Glasgow photographer Jack Middleton, who walked with a limp after childhood polio, was sent to photograph Bader at a memorial garden in Cupar. Says John: “Bader saw a limping Jack approaching and angrily said, ‘Are you taking the mickey?’ Jack merely replied, ‘No, I thought you were.’”

  TALKING about the great Cunard liners, entertainer Jimmie MacGregor rounds off our apprentice stories by recalling: “We were filming The White Heather Club on board the QE2 just before it was launched at Clydebank. As I was descending a gangplank I met a young apprentice coming up. ‘Wherrs a’ the burds?’ he enquired, expecting to meet The White Heather Club’s dancers. I had to inform him that there wiz nae burds, as they had broken for lunch. He swore, then cheerfully added, ‘And here’s me went and combed up a’ ma herr ana’ tae.’”

  AND our tale about the apprentice boiling the curry in the tea urn reminds a reader: “A colleague popped an egg into the kettle she was boiling for the office morning tea. One of the men discovered this and, grabbing a spoon, fished the egg out of the kettle and threw it into the bin, screaming at her, ‘Do you realise where that has been?’”

  A WORKER in a Glasgow office was impressed when his boss came up to a fellow worker and told her cheerily: ‘You’ve been volunteered to . . .” She interrupted her boss and said: “I think you’ll find that the word is ‘voluntold’.”

  APPRENTICES, continued. Says Marie Murray: “My late father was a maintenance engineer and the factory had a machine making machine parts, which was operated by a knee switch.

  “My father told a poor unfortunate apprentice that the machine was voice operated, sat down, and said ‘Go!’ while pressing the knee switch. Of course, the machine part popped out on cue. The apprentice sat down, said ‘Go’, and, naturally, nothing happened. My father had lots of sport suggesting the fellow spoke louder, quieter, whisper, should even sing the command, all to no avail while a crowd watched.”

  WE asked about conversations where you tell folk what you do for a living, and Russell Smith in Kilbirnie says: “Bothered some years ago by an over-zealous waiter in an Indian restaurant. I responded to his latest of several questions of where did I work with ‘HM Customs and Revenue Glasgow’. End of questions.”

  A HYNDLAND reader reports a dilemma that
many of us face these days. She says: “I wake up saying to myself that I have so much to do and worry that there are not enough hours in the day. A couple of hours later I’m somehow doing a quiz on Facebook to discover what my gangster name would be.”

  TODAY’S piece of daftness comes from a reader who emails: “I was just thinking that the human brain is such an amazing thing – but then I realised who was telling me that – my brain.”

  8

  Cheers

  After spending so much time at work, it is not surprising that so many folk still nip into their local for a drink and a chat. Here are their pub and socialising stories.

  SEEMINGLY there is a carbon dioxide shortage which could affect beer supplies. Pub chain Wetherspoons says it will review the situation in the next few days, however a “Spoons” customer phones The Diary to explain: “Regulars are advised that if they bring a straw there’s a couple of weeks’ worth in the carpets.”

  THE Herald news story that the grounds of Burns Cottage are to be planted with the crops of his era makes our mind wander to when Alex Ferguson owned the other Burns Cottage – a pub on Glasgow’s Paisley Road West. No idea what it’s called now. We just remember a woman telling us there was a band playing at the Cottage one night and they were all invited to someone’s party in Govan afterwards. There was a sing-song and when the band’s singer was asked to give them a number he loftily declared that he only sang for money. A penny was thrown at him with the instruction, “Now sing.” He did.

  THINKING of having a party at Christmas? A Glasgow reader tells us a work colleague alleges that when he held a Christmas party a few years ago in his West End flat he got so fed up with so many folk, half of whom he did not know, staying on into the small hours that he slipped outside and phoned the cops to complain about the noise, and just as he wished, a police car arrived shortly afterwards and told him to turn the music off because of complaints, and he managed to shuffle folk out.

  A NEWTON MEARNS reader passes on: “My friend was telling me that bringing up three kids of preschool age meant she had to say no to many dinner-party invitations.

  “When she eventually went out for dinner at friends, she automatically started cutting the chicken of the person sitting next to her.”

  WE savoured a few whisky stories last week, which reminded Andy Bryson in Ardrossan: “Around 1970 I worked as a ‘shop boy’ for Couper Wilkie’s Wine Merchant in Saltcoats. A customer asked for our best whisky, and I indicated that the Glenlivet distilled in 1936 was probably the best and it was over £30. He said that would be perfect and I reached up to the top shelf to get the bottle. Couper saw me stretching up and ventured out of the office to oversee the transaction. I was just wrapping it when the customer asked for six bottles of ginger ale. Couper asked the customer if it was to be used with the Glenlivet and when the answer was ‘yes’ he took it from me, unwrapped it, put it back on the shelf and handed the customer a bottle of Bells, saying, ‘You are not putting 1970 Canada Dry into 1936 malt whisky.’ Customer went away quite happy, having saved about £25.”

  PUB chain Wetherspoons, which appears to have a pub on every street corner in Glasgow’s city centre, has decided to stop using social media. Chairman Tim Martin told the BBC it will be good for society in general, stating if people “limited their social media to half an hour a day, they’d be mentally and physically better off”. He added: “I find most people I know waste their time on it. A lot of them say they know they waste their time on it, but they struggle to get off it.” A bemused reader emails: “So a bit like drinking in a Wetherspoons pub?”

  WE have, we must admit, more than a fair share of pub stories in the Diary. Jimmy Nimmo in Ayr adds to the oeuvre by recalling: “A few years ago my wife and I found an ancient coaching house off the M6 for lunch and my wife excused herself to go to the Ladies. She was gone a few minutes when suddenly a bright light above the bar started flashing, and an alarm began loudly ringing. I was quite disturbed by this, but the locals seemed unmoved – at least till my wife came back, and she got a standing ovation.

  “Turned out that in the Ladies’ loo there was a doll of a red-faced Scotsman in a kilt, and a notice stating, ‘If you want to know what the Scotsman has under his kilt – pull the string.’ The string had two purposes – to lift the kilt and secondly to activate the flashing light and alarm.”

  THAT cheap and cheerful raucous bar Yates’s Wine Lodge on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street has closed – probably going to be student flats like every other gap site in the city – but anyway, we liked the former customers bemoaning its disappearance on social media, with one Glasgow chap telling his pal: “Mind breakdancing in here while you were on the sick with a bad back?”

  TRAVEL site TripAdvisor lists complaints, but we do like it when establishments reply. Someone was unhappy with Glasgow’s great whisky bar The Pot Still and wrote that they were ignored at the bar. Pot Still management viewed the security tape and explained: “You came to the bar at 13:32:51, you turned away at 13:33:11 so all told you spent 20 seconds waiting before leaving. The youngest Scotch we sell waits three years in cask before it’s even considered a whisky, let alone ready to be bottled. The oldest whisky we have waited 50 years before being bottled. When it went into cask, no one knew who Sergeant Pepper was and the UK was trying to get INTO Europe.

  “If you feel 20 seconds is too long in your life to hang on in that company, then maybe you’re not ready for whisky yet.”

  ONE of Glasgow’s loveliest publicans, Elaine Scott, has retired from that great whisky and traditional music bar in Finnieston, the Ben Nevis. We like the interview in the trade magazine Dram where Elaine talks about the famous people who have called in, particularly as the Ben is so near the Hydro. Her list included Dolly Parton’s drummer but then she added the memorable explanation: “He was just passing the time while he washed his drawers in the laundrette across the road.”

  THE popular Bag O’ Nails pub in Dumbarton Road in Partick was named as Independent Bar of the Year in Dram magazine’s Scottish Bar and Pub Awards.

  Owner Mark Lappin, a music fan, tells me it was named after the first club in Britain that Jimi Hendrix played at, thus denying a Partick rumour I heard that it was named after the looks of the drinkers when the pub was previously the rather feisty Partick Tavern.

  THE Herald reported that the Edinburgh Fringe will be the first festival to allow folk to use contactless technology on their credit and debit cards to tip street performers because of the reduction in people carrying cash. Not everyone though is happy with contactless payments. As a Liam Forrest revealed on social media yesterday: “Lost my bank card last night and some dafty’s just used the contactless at Crown Stores. Do me a favour, mate – bring me a wee tin of Irn-Bru. I’ve got some hangover.”

  OUR false-teeth stories have perhaps inevitably led to a number of readers sending us the classic tale of the Glasgow chap at the formal dinner who had forgotten to put in his teeth, and the guest next to him saying: “I think I can help you. Give me a couple of minutes – my premises are just down the road.” He reappeared a short time later and handed over a set of dentures which fitted perfectly.

  “Great fit,” said the man. “You must be an excellent dentist.”

  “I’m not a dentist,” he said. “I’m an undertaker.”

  OUR tale of the cinema usherette who walked down the aisle at her wedding backwards has entertainer Andy Cameron reminiscing.

  He said: “The Wee Royal, in Main Street Bri’gton, had forms rather than individual seats so the usherette would put you in at one end and tell the rest to ‘shove alang a bit’.

  “The result was that the one at the other end was dumped into the aisle and promptly ran back to the other end to start the process all over.

  “It was a sort of Magic Roundabout before the telly.”

  OUR tales of old cinemas remind David Purdie: “On Saturday afternoons my brother and I used to go to the Grand in Stockbridge, which was a bit rough and rea
dy. The toilet had an emergency exit that opened out on to the street by using a push bar. The rowdier elements would deputise one of their number to pay to get in, and he would then go to the toilet, open the door and half of Stockbridge would pour in for free.

  “During a Tarzan film I was in the Gents just as an invasion was happening.

  “The manager rushed in and chucked everybody out, including me who had legally paid. When the programme ended, my brother emerged totally unaware that I hadn’t returned from the loo.”

  OUR stories about barbers reminds an Ayrshire reader of the tale of the minister who was getting shaved by the local barber, who had obviously been out on a bender the night before as his hand was shaking and he nicked the minister’s chin a couple of times, drawing blood. “That’s the whisky that causes that,” said the minister disapprovingly.

  “That’s right,” replied the barber. “It does make your skin awfy tender.”

  THE lights are about to come up on our old cinema stories, but time for Neil Dunn to tell us: “Many years ago I had an unpaid job as a monitor for the Saturday morning kids’ matinee at the Waverley cinema in Shawlands. Free entry without queuing was the only payment and my only task, apart from spotting smokers, was to guard the emergency exit to stop anyone attempting to leave before ‘The Queen’ was finished playing. Can’t think of this catching on nowadays.”