The Herald Diary

by Ken Smith

  WE mentioned the dwindling art of sending postcards and Robert Gardner tells us: “My first holiday abroad was at a Scout Jamboree in Greece when I was 16. I had been told that a postcard was expected, and after a few days I sent one packed with information about how I was getting on and so on. When I got home there was the card marked out of 10 for punctuation and grammar. From then on postcards were sent with one word only – ‘Fine’.”

  MUSICIAN Roy Gullane adds to our B&B stories by telling us: “A fellow performer, finding himself peckish after a show, managed to grope his way through the darkened house into the kitchen. He could see nothing edible except a huge 40lb block of cheddar cheese, into which he plunged the only available cutting tool, a rather large steak knife. He was just about to liberate a goodly chunk when a voice boomed out behind him, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Slightly flustered, our hero looked at the B&B proprietor, back to the cheese and knife, and said, ‘Whoever pulls it out gets to be king.’”

  WE asked for your postcard stories before they disappear, and Robin Gilmour in Milngavie tells us about the chap who sent his girlfriend a postcard with a bathing beauty on the front. When he got home he had some explaining to do as when writing “Wish you were here” on the back, he missed out the last letter.

  GOING on holiday can be stressful. Mount Vernon reader Maureen Lanigan tells us her brother John was in a Greggs in Hastings when a wee Scottish woman behind him asked for a pie. When the assistant asked what kind, and she replied, “A Scotch pie!” the girl asked what that was.

  “A wee roon’ pie wae mince in it!” replied the shocked customer, and John had to tell her they didn’t do them down in Hastings. “But it’s Greggs!” the perplexed woman replied. “They must do them!” Before adding: “What are we going to eat!”

  BUS tours, continued. Says Willie McLean in Dumbarton: “Some years ago while on a bus tour in Dublin, we were passing the Guinness Brewery and the hostess told us the story about Arthur Guinness. He married his wife Olivia in 1761 and they had 21 children. Sadly only 10 survived to adulthood. We were told Olivia was hard of hearing and when retiring at night Arthur would say, ‘Are we going to sleep or what?’ Olivia would frequently reply, ‘What?’ The rest is history.”

  TOUR buses, continued. If you have ever visited Lewis, you might have seen the 20-foot-high whalebone arch at Bragar which is formed from the jawbones of a blue whale. A reader tells us: “The late Iain Morrison provided tours around the island, often for passengers off cruise ships. When he approached Bragar he would begin an account of a family having an exceptionally large turkey at Christmas. It was, according to Iain, large enough to feed everyone in the village. When the bus came round the last bend and into full sight of the arch, he explained to the bemused passengers that it was the wishbone of the mythical turkey.”

  OUR story about midges reminds Roddy Young of staying at a lodge in Dalavich, Argyll and Bute, last summer when he had a look in the guest book. Someone had written: “We all had a good stay. Very enjoyable. Except for midgets!” Roddy felt that seemed a bit harsh.

  BUS tours, continued. John Barrington writes: “A while ago, one of the tour-bus drivers, who frequented Inversnaid Hotel, was renowned for pointing out places of interest to his passengers, mostly people from south of Hadrian’s Wall.

  “His particular passion seemed to be ancient battlefields; here the hillside where the Scots beat the Auld Enemy, there the field where the Scots triumphed over the Auld Enemy. And so on, day after day.

  “Towards the end of one particular holiday, a visitor spoke up, saying that, from his now-rather-distant schooldays, he could remember the teacher telling of an occasional English victory over the Scots. This met with the instant rejoinder, ‘No’ on my bus, they didn’t!’”

  CONGRATULATIONS to David Keat at the Brander Lodge Hotel near Oban, who got himself lots of publicity by saying he would serve burgers coated in a midge dressing. It reminds us of the English tourist who was complaining about being bitten by midges at a Scottish tearoom and a customer advising her that she should try midge nets, which were sold in the shop next door. “Are they difficult to catch?” she asked.

  AMERICANS – we really do love them. Scottish band the Tannahill Weavers are on a tour of the States just now and were playing in Wisconsin the other night. Says band member Roy Gullane: “At the après-show ‘meet ’n’ greet’ I was informed by an older lady (ages wi’ masel’) that she had visited Edinburgh many years ago. ‘Do they still have the castle?’ she enquired. I was going to tell her it was now an IKEA but didn’t like to burst her bubble.”

  BUS tours, continued. Says John Anderson in Bishopton: “I am a tour guide and I was with a group of American tourists at the Rest and Be Thankful viewpoint. Looking at the surrounding hills one of them asked me, ‘Do they mow the grass round here?’”

  TRAVELLERS often ask website TripAdvisor for help, and a 19-year-old from Boston in the US wrote this week: “Hey there! I’m going to Glasgow and was wondering if there was any way I can make some friends. My friends, who were supposed to go with me, told me they don’t want to go any more, so I’m flying solo.”

  After various suggestions about pubs, tours, cafes and so on, a chap who calls himself Mad Scotsman astutely replied: “Stand at a bus stop and mention the weather.”

  OUR tales of tourists remind David Russell in Penicuik of a local building a house, who was wearing a T-shirt with “Sheriff” printed within a star on the front and carrying a long-handled axe he had just bought in a hardware store. Says David: “Bearded, and looking a bit like Grizzly Adams, he walked down the main street only to be accosted by a passing American tourist driving a camper van. ‘Excuse me officer, is this the route to Edinburg?’ After giving the colonial cousin directions he wondered what this guy thought Scottish cops actually looked like.”

  COULDN’T believe how red a colleague’s face has become with all this sunny weather.

  He saw me staring so came over to tell me: “I saw a sign in a shop ‘Midge nets £10’. I didn’t even know insects could play the lottery.”

  WE turn to holiday site TripAdvisor, where the Wallace Monument near Stirling gets hundreds of enthusiastic reviews, and one negative remark where a visitor from Oaxaca, Mexico, states: “We decided not to pay the entrance fee and waited for our companions in the Keeper’s Lodge. We were initially delighted to be provided with a charming colouring page featuring a kilt-clad bear, but from this point on, our visit took a severe turn for the worse.

  “We were exceptionally disappointed by the monument’s upkeep of their coloured pencil supplies. Not only were the vast majority dull to the point of dysfunction, they were utterly lacking in pigmentation. I would warn any future visitors against high expectations for the coloured pencil offerings at this location.”

  Wallace Monument staff replied that they have now sharpened the pencils.

  AH, the Scottish accent. Donald Grant tells us: “My family and I are down in Hampshire, and while visiting the village pub for lunch, the bar lady confided in me how much she enjoyed hearing a Scottish accent again.

  “She whispered that several years ago she had met a Scot and his accent made her go all weak at the knees every time that she had gone out with him – but she had to give him up. Her answer to my questioning look was not what I had expected: ‘My husband found out.’ ”

  11

  Travel Broadens the Mind

  Travel can be a stressful time. But where there is stress there is often humour. Here are our readers’ tales from when they go out and about.

  STRESSFUL time, going on holiday. As Paddy Galloway recorded on his way to Portugal: “Scenes in Dublin Airport as a red-faced man shouts at his wife for losing the passports. ‘You remembered every ******* pair of shoes but not the ******* passports’ has been the standout line.”

  LOTS of folk using the Uber app in Glasgow to summon cabs. But it does have the occasional drawback. A reader in the city centre at the weekend heard a young woman
who was staring at her phone ask her pal: “A Nissan Pulsar Acenta? Who the heck knows what that looks like?”

  A COLLEAGUE comes over to tell us: “I’ve discovered a cure for my fear of flying – 23 hours on a National Express coach.”

  AN Ayrshire reader tells us: “Sometimes you forget how proud you can feel to be Scottish.” He was chatting to a work colleague in England who had been in the Royal Navy for 20 years and he asked him if he had ever seen any action. Adds our reader: “Totally straight-faced he told me, ‘The guy next to me went down to gunfire once, that was the closest.’ When I asked where, he told me in the eighties HMS London sailed up the Clyde on a Friday night and, as the crew took to the deck to see the city lights, the sailor next to him was struck on the shoulder by a shot fired by a gang of neds on the embankment with an air rifle.”

  WE are all a bit afraid of saying anything challenging to flight crew these days, as you sense they are ready at a moment’s notice to call security. So a reader flying down to London from Glasgow was impressed when a chap using his phone to play games while the plane stood on the tarmac was told by a steward to put his phone on airplane mode and the chap replied: “We’ve been sitting here for half an hour – is it not time to put the plane in airplane mode?’”

  WE mentioned Chic Murray gags, and thank you to readers who sent in their favourites. Sadly we’ve printed most of them before, but one I hadn’t heard came from John Mathieson, who says: “I liked his comment on the compensation culture where individuals took advantage of deficiencies in the performance of public services. As a schoolboy he was on the top deck of a bus with his father when the bus performed a very abrupt emergency stop. Passengers were thrown forwards, and Chic said, ‘I was uninjured, but fortunately my father had the presence of mind to throw me down the stairs.’”

  WE asked about stressful airport moments and a reader in America tells us of a team from the US flying to the World Irish Dance Championships in Glasgow last year who were carrying their expensive dance dresses in suit bags as well as their normal carry-on luggage. An officious airline staff member insisted they check them into the hold, which the girls resisted, fearing damage. After a hurried consultation the girls came up with the idea of putting the dresses on over their normal clothes, stuffed the empty suit bags in their hand luggage, then changed out of them once on the plane. The official was no doubt hopping mad.

  WE do love bus drivers. Sue Wade in Ayr was at her local bus station when she heard a passenger ask the driver: “How long to get to Hamilton?”

  “Ages,” he replied.

  GOOD to see sexism being challenged. Sandy Tuckerman recalls: “On a late-night flight from London Gatwick, in the days before the flight-deck doors were locked and bolted, the announcement was, ‘Ten minutes to landing, wenches on the benches.’

  “The senior flight attendant stormed into the cockpit, slamming the door behind her. A rather contrite announcement was then made by the captain: ‘I do apologise, ladies and gentlemen. What I meant to say was, cabin crew, seats for landing.’”

  YES, it’s Easter this weekend, but that doesn’t mean all the parking meters in Glasgow are free to use. We remember a reader going back to his car on an Easter Monday and, seeing it was being ticketed, he remonstrated with the warden that it was a bank holiday. “It’s no’ a bank holiday for me, pal,” he replied, and kept on writing.

  AH yes, public transport. We can sympathise with artist Moose Allain who says: “The old lady sitting near me on this train must have seen some things in her lifetime, have so many amazing tales to tell. Unfortunately, the one she’s been telling for the last half an hour isn’t one of them.”

  OUR story about breakfast in Glasgow reminds former BBC producer Mike Shaw of the late great folk singer Danny Kyle once telling him about travelling overnight to Glasgow after a gig in the north of England and being desperate for breakfast.

  Although it was five in the morning Danny spotted a greasy spoon that was open, rushed in and ordered a full breakfast and a cup of coffee.

  When the coffee arrived he took a large gulp and smilingly told the waitress it tasted like nectar.

  “Well, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it,” she replied.

  A LATE-ARRIVING-TRAIN story, with Mark Boyle in Johnstone telling us: “During the recent snow, ScotRail blared over the tannoy at Johnstone that, during the rush hour, trains would be up to half an hour late, subject to cancellation at short notice and accommodation inside carriages would be standing room only. I wonder where to thank them for the improved service?”

  A REFLECTION on life at Glasgow Airport. A reader passing through the security area hears the official ask a passenger just before she goes through the metal detector if she has anything in her pockets. “No,” she replied.

  “I know how that feels,” he replies ruefully.

  BUS stories, continued. Says Mary Duncan: “One morning on my way to work there was a passenger singing like a linty, happily drunk. He got off the bus just before me, and when I moved to the front I said to the driver, ‘How can someone be that drunk at eight in the morning?’ The driver’s reply: ‘Just lucky, I guess.’”

  TODAY’S piece of sheer daftness comes from Chris Addison, who says: “Well, turns out when they say at the station, ‘If you see anything suspicious please report it to a member of staff,’ they don’t mean those posters claiming 97 per cent of the trains last month were on time.”

  GERMAN newspapers reported that the Berlin Wall has now been down longer than it actually existed, if you can follow that arithmetical conundrum. It reminds us of the Scottish doctor who told us about being at a medical conference in Berlin in the eighties where a local medic took him to see the wall. He told us: “Directly opposite was a tower with an East German armed guard. Between us and the wall was a fence, then a no-man’s-land of bare ground. Directly under the guard, written on the wall was ‘Gers Ya Bass’.

  “I started laughing. My German friend asked what was so amusing, and I explained. He was dumbfounded. ‘You mean that someone risked his life to write a football slogan on this wall, where so many have been shot? This has been on the wall for a year – we had no idea what it meant, or even the language it was in.’”

  THE railways folk have announced you will no longer be able to share a sleeper carriage between London and Glasgow with a stranger, which was a way of saving yourself 50 quid or so. We always remember our late, great colleague Willie Hunter’s description of sharing a sleeper back to Glasgow after watching Scotland beat the world champions at Wembley in 1967. Wrote Willie: “After taking a refreshment, I fell on to the top bunk of a train sleeper from Euston. At wakey-wakey time the mouth felt like the inside of Jim Baxter’s stockings.

  “Silently, over the rim of the bed appeared a bottle of Irn-Bru. With my provident companion from downstairs, who turned out to be a van driver and a Clyde supporter, there was a happy hour of living the triumph all over again, while we took our mornings of his Bru and what we could find in our half-bottles.”

  OUR bus stories remind Ronnie McLean of working as an SMT bus conductor as a student in the sixties. He recalls: “Running late on a trip to Killermont Street, we stopped at lights on Cathedral Street and the driver told me to change the destination blind so we could make a quick getaway. While I was hanging on to the front of the bus – a Bristol Lodekka for the anoraks – the lights changed and he drove off with me clinging on. Typical of Glasgow, no one in the crowded bus station batted an eyelid.”

  AND talking of tramcars, enough readers to fill a tramcar have got in touch with the classic tale, so I suppose we should repeat it, of the greyhound owner outside Shawfield trying to get on a tramcar with two dugs but being told by the clippie that there was already a dog on board and only two were allowed in total.

  After a long and heated argument in which the conductress would not bend the rules, he eventually stormed off in anger, shouting at her: “You can stick your caur up your backside.” She merely shouted
back: “Aye, if you’d done that with wan o’ yer dugs, you would’ve got oan.”

  WE mentioned the reduction of postcards these days, and Martin McGeehan in Gourock recalls a school trip to St Malo in the sixties which was the first trip abroad for most of them. Says Martin: “We were tasked on day one with buying a postcard and stamp to send news of our arrival and comfortable accommodation to home. A pal addressed his card to his family at ‘Rue de Forsyth, Greenock’ so that ‘the French postman would know where to deliver it’.”

  THE Herald archive picture of a burned-down Glasgow theatre reminds David Miller in Milngavie of another Glasgow theatre consumed by fire, the old Queen’s Theatre. Says David: “The theatre’s resident comic Sammy Murray was on a tram and asked the conductress, ‘Does this caur go over Jamaica Street Bridge?’

  “‘If it disnae,’ she replied, ‘there’s gonna be a hell of a splash.’”

  BIT of a stooshie on social media as our old chum, writer and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, commented: “Arriving in Glasgow, every person leaving bus thanks the driver. Such a contrast from impersonal silence at Stansted.” SNP MSP Roseanna Cunningham agreed with her, stating: “Used to do that in London to bus drivers – they always looked shocked that anyone would thank them!” Many others, though, said that thanking bus drivers happened all over Britain, and people in Scotland should be less sanctimonious.