LEARNED this week that a fear of clowns is known as coulrophobia - and the young lad on the right looks as though he is a prime candidate for it. This is the Kelvin Hall Circus in December 1955 and ask any Glaswegian who attended what their memory of it is and almost all will say: "The smell" - a throat-catching mixture of elephant urine and candy floss. The circus was at the back of the Kelvin Hall with the main area holding the carnival which most folk preferred. You could stand at the back of the carnival and watch the circus elephants, with one leg heavily chained, robotically sweeping the straw with their trunks. It made most of us animal rights activists.

As one reader once told us: "I remember being quite delighted when a lion peed on a school mate through the bars of its cage. We refused to travel home on the tram with him." Ah the memories.