Junior jinxed
The Diary has been reporting on Donald Trump’s magisterial visit to Scotland, where the great, the good and the genuflecting arrived at his Turnberry compound, then queued in a long line to ask the American President if he could recommend a decent sand wedge to use on the golf course.
Advertisement
Or perhaps they were there to plead for a sympathetic tariff arrangement.
Such abject grovelling reminds us of the arrangement at Diary Towers, where every morning our gang of craven reporters crawls on hands and knees into the Editor’s office to have their orders for the day barked at them from across the Supreme Leader’s desk.
This can be a tad humiliating, as you can imagine, though it suits the Diary’s 106-year-old copyboy, Junior, who can’t walk upright any more, ever since that last operation when he got his knees replaced, his hips replaced, his ankle bones replaced and all of his spine. (We hear rumours that the surgeon who undertook the procedure gave the spine to his son as a birthday present, telling him it was a xylophone.)
Gone are the days when Junior was a mere stripling of a lad, aged 105, and would scoot into the office on his skateboard.
Advertisement
Still, there are many pleasures remaining to him, such as helping to compile the following classic tales from our archives…
The Graduate
We recall a prison English teacher who once asked if the class knew what a sentence was.
Another teacher in East Ayrshire asked a pupil what his big brother, who she had previously taught, was doing.
“Six months,” came the replay.
Spend, spend, spend
A Hamilton T-shirt printers had a customer who requested a shirt made for his wife who had recently returned from New York, and a hefty credit card bill had ensued.
He asked for a shirt with the usual “I Love NY” on the front, and on the back “Veni, Vidi, Visa”, roughly translated as “I came, I saw, I spent”.
Advertisement
Petals and petting
A reader was in an Edinburgh florist shop and spotted a chap ordering a large bouquet.
The florist wrote down the message he wanted on the card, then thinking of a final flourish to add, asked: “Will you want kisses?”
“I’ll be expecting a lot more than that,” the chap replied.
Brought to book
We always assumed that an author signing a book added to its value for the reader.
Not so in Glasgow’s Waterstone’s in Sauchiehall Street, where one of our correspondents watched as an elderly woman picked up a signed novel, only for her helpful friend to tell her: “Don’t get that one. Someone’s written on it.”
Cutting comment
“He must be great at his job,” said a young lad staring in the window of a key- cutting shop in Glasgow. “Look at all the trophies he’s got.”
