Lack of snack

GLASGOW TV and radio personality Paul Coia has a painful confession to make.

“I’m being hypocritical this morning,” he says, “when protesting about my childhood fave sweet, Caramac, being discontinued due to falling sales. A colleague just asked me when I last bought one. Erm…”

(And the moral of this tragic tale? Take a daily dose of your Caramac snack, or your Caramac snack, it won’t be back.)

Madcap monikers, continued

THE Diary is celebrating wacky workplace nicknames.

Says Ken Mackay from Netherlee: “I once worked at a joinery company where one of the employees was known as Minty, because he always came in After Eight.”

Crabby about Crimbo

ON social media, former Glasgow South Labour MP Tom Harris makes an astute festive observation: “It feels like complaints about Christmas starting earlier every year start earlier every year.”

Rhyme time, continued

THE Diary is trying to figure out what certain objects would be called if they had been named by the same bright spark who decided to call a two-way radio a walkie-talkie.

Reader Graham Andrews says: “I’m guessing a defibrillator would be called a hearty-starty.”

Gretna a-go-go?

A tale of the torrid and tempestuous sort, from the supposedly sanctified gates of the kirk, no less.

Eric MacDonald says: “As a member of a church in the seventies, long before email communications, a monthly newsletter was delivered to our members.

“I well remember one such publication, where the last line on the first page read: ‘Thanks to Jane White and Mark Brown for running off’.”

Browsers of the scandalous newsletter must have been swooning, collapsing onto a nearby chaise longue, then reaching for the sal volatile.

If only those same browsers had flipped over to the next page of the document, where they would have read the conclusion of the sentence, which was ‘…the newsletter on the Gestetner.’

(Younger Diary readers should be made aware that a Gestetner was a duplicating machine, not a nippy roadster to hasten an eloping couple to Gretna Green.)

Marie’s munchables

FINANCIALLY speaking, these are proving to be difficult times.

Which is why the Diary has decided to save business organisations oodles of dosh, by suggesting that instead of paying a fortune for celeb endorsements, they instead use famous figures from history to promote their goodies.

David Donaldson says: “Mr Kipling could have Marie Antoinette, saying ‘Let them eat cake’."

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Farmyard funny

FOOD for thought. Reader David Austin gets in touch to ask: “Is a cow without legs ground beef?”