Half-baked?

WORD reaches the Diary that a group of Scottish chefs are hotfooting it to Stuttgart where they’ll battle a bunch of rival cooks from other parts of the globe in something called the Culinary Olympics. The competition lasts from tomorrow until next Wednesday, which is as much information as we’ve managed to accrue. (Or should that be a-crudité, as we’re reporting on the adventures of chefs?)

We could, of course, research the Culinary Olympics to find out what it entails. Though we’d much rather use our imaginations. Leading us to conclude that the combined cooking and sporting activities will include a pole vault competition using exceedingly long pieces of uncooked spaghetti.

And in a special nod to the Scottish competitors, there will be a shot put event with cooks exerting themselves to find out who can chuck a deep-fried pizza the farthest.

Card trick

WITH Valentine’s Day a heartbeat away, Russell Smith from Kilbirnie is reminded of the klutz Casanova who sent the Valentine card meant for his wife to his girlfriend, and the one intended for the girlfriend to the wife.

The tragic result of this epic postal failure was the missus now believed hubby wanted to sleep with her, while the girlfriend’s heart flitter-fluttered with the (fake) news that her chap was in love with her.

Kwai bother?

WE’VE been attempting to come up with a suitable name for the proposed bridge linking Scotland to Northern Ireland. Reader John Dunlop suggests it should be called the Major Clipton Bridge. His reasoning? Major Clipton is the character in the classic David Lean flick, The Bridge on the River Kwai, who famously describes the delusional endeavour to build the bridge of the movie’s title as: “Madness… madness.”

Taking the biscuit

FUMBLED phrases continued. James McGovern has fond recollections of the time he spent as an apprentice glazier. The journeyman he trained alongside was also the firm’s shop steward. This fellow would regularly deliver furious rants / impassioned speeches. (How his words were perceived depended on the listener’s political proclivities, of course.)

While delivering these lectures, the talkative shop steward would relentlessly list the calamitous cracks in the capitalist system. How workers were exploited by employers… were only numbers on a payroll… could be discarded on a whim…

The rant (speech) would invariably conclude with the same majestic flourish.

"Remember Jimmy,” he would say. “No one is indigestible."

Deadening effect

READER Sam Cummings’ grief counsellor died recently. “Clearly he did a good job,” says Sam, “Because I didn’t care.”

Read more: Charles Laughton in Edinburgh, 1958