Flat dweller
SINGER Amy Macdonald has been telling a rather peculiar tale involving a pal who was in work when she noticed a woman standing at the window in a flat opposite. No big deal, she thought. Just a lady in a bit of a dwam, gazing out the window. An hour later the woman hadn’t budged, which concerned Amy’s pal. Was the woman depressed and thinking about jumping from the window? Or perhaps a wicked hypnotist had frozen her to the spot, then left her to imitate a marble statue for the rest of her days.
Needing an answer, Amy’s pal went to get a better view. The woman turned out to be a life-size cardboard cut-out of Judi Dench.
And for anyone who believes it was the real Judi Dench… impossible. The dame never gives a flat performance.
Meal breaks
THE Diary’s latest campaign is to find amusing stories about kitchen appliances. Like a knight of the Round Table galloping off to kebab a dragon with his jousting lance, Archie Wohlgemuth accepts our challenge. “When we got married, I bought a microwave for the kitchen and my wife bought a dinner gong,” says Archie, who then adds: “We had a lot of ding-dong battles in that house.”
Grammar drama
NOVELIST and television presenter Damian Barr isn’t a fellow who struggles to write perfectly polished paragraphs. Yet while typing on his computer he has been plagued of late with pop-up adds for something called "Grammarly", a writing app created to help the linguistically challenged. When Grammarly informed Damian it could help him, it instantly put the outraged writer in a rage: “Oh can it now?” he snarls. “Can it write a scene for me, and then make me some tea and finish my tax return?”
Alas, it transpires that the answer to the above is no, no and (consults notes) … no.
Number’s up
OUR recent tale about a bloke with a nifty nickname reminds Sandy Harris of a fellow of his acquaintance who was labelled Elevenerife. “Anything you did, he’d say he’d done it bigger and better,” says Sandy. “So if you’d recently returned from Tenerife, he’d claim he was just back from Elevenerife.”
Warped weather
OUR run of fumbled phrases continues. Pete Sykes recalls a local TV weather forecaster who bungled the job by promising that the following day would see: “Sunny showers and scattered intervals.” Though as Peter points out, her words weren’t all that far from the truth.
“The phrase just about covers most days in Scotland,” he sighs.
Mixed messages
WHILE he was driving on the motorway, reader Paul McCrumb’s wife said to him, “Hey, you missed a right!” This pleased Paul a great deal. “I leaned over and replied: ‘Well you Misses right.’”
To which the Diary says: Isn’t love grand? (And often hopelessly confused.)
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