The Beer Hunter

THE SCOTS comic-book writer Mark Millar (Kick-Ass, Wanted, etc, etc) tweeted yesterday that his hectic schedule included “talking to a director about casting a bad guy, chatting to a ballistics guy about firing a machine gun as you fall from a plane and organising a trip to the seaside for families in my old housing estate.”

That last item caught the eye of one Kevin Murray.

“If it’s Ayr beach,” he told Millar, “I buried 8 cans of Tennent’s Velvet in the sand directly across from the crazy golf in 2008 and couldn’t find them again in my inebriated state. Yours if ye find them.”

“This is the best treasure hunt ever,” Millar responded.

Long to rain over us

THIS prolonged spell of nice weather has reminded Meg Henderson of something that happened when she arrived back home from India, where she had spent two years working as a volunteer in a hospital.

“It was the end of July and the only rain I’d seen was monsoon rain,”says Meg. “I jumped in a taxi and said ‘Oh look, it’s raining! Haven’t seen normal rain in years!’

“The driver wasn’t impressed by globe-trotters, however. He muttered dourly ‘Aye, an’ it’s wet an’ a’.’ Nothing more was said for the rest of the journey ...”

On a similar theme, the Diary recently heard of a taxi-driver who arrived in a downpour to pick up a young couple at a railway station, and was startled to see the the woman, deeply tanned, positively frolicking in the rain.

“Don’t mind her,” her partner shrugged. “She’s just spent six months in Dubai and this is the first rain she’s seen.”

On the cards

DAVID Donaldson, meanwhile, says he was in Sainsbury the other day (other supermarkets are of course available), when in the greeting-cards section he spotted a rather nice With Sympathy card, so he bought two. “If that isn’t a sign of getting old, I don’t what is,” he says.

Screen test

BUS tours, continued. “Your mention of the tour bus in China,” says John Robertson, “reminds me of an item I read in an old issue of the Lonely Planet guide to China. It advised that if you took a tour bus there, you should ‘sit as far back in the coach as possible. This would give you a better chance of stopping before you hit the windscreen’.”

Maggie's mistake

THE centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth reminds Dennis Canavan of the occasion when Mandela addressed the Westminster Parliament in 1996.

Just before proceedings began, Dennis saw Baroness Thatcher nearby and expressed surprise that she should be there.

"When she asked me why," he says, "I reminded her that, when she was Prime Minister, she had claimed that Mandela was a terrorist and that anyone who thought the ANC would ever form a government must be living in cloud-cuckoo land.

"She replied : 'Well, we’re all entitled to make one mistake'. I was about to respond that she had far exceeded her entitlement - but, just at that moment, President Mandela arrived, and peace broke out."