Wedding warbler
COLIN Hay is the lead singer with Men at Work, the pop group whose greatest fame was in the 1980s. The band are rightly regarded as one of Australia’s finest, though Colin actually grew up in Scotland, and his new solo album, Now and the Evermore, has a photo on the front cover of the place he was raised, Hamilton Street in Saltcoats.
Colin, who is now based in LA, attended a friend’s wedding a while back. For the occasion he played an acoustic version of his hit, Down Under, for the assembled revellers.
A young chap came up to Colin afterwards and said: “Wow, man! That’s a really great version of that song!”
“Thank you very much,” beamed Colin. “You know, I wrote that song.”
An awkward silence ensued, before the young chap said: “Oh. Well it was still good.”
Cutting comment
NOTICING that he was getting rather fuzzy around the outer margins, Ian Noble from Carstairs Village decided to get his hair trimmed last week.
While the job was being done, our reader asked the hairdresser if he had ever thought of moving to Turkey and opening up as a Scottish barber…
On yer bike
MADCAP malapropisms, continued. Iain Colvin from Bridge of Weir is a great collector of muddled-up language. He says one of the favourite speeches he has heard involved someone explaining to him: “I know I’m going off on a tandem when I say this…”
Money and meaning
TIME for some metaphysical musings, courtesy of Douglas Thomson from Cumbernauld, who gets in touch to explain: “Atheism and religion are two sides of the same coin. One uses its head. The other relies on tales.”
Attire or satire?
ANOTHER tale of pop star shenanigans. Stuart Murdoch, the lead singer with Glasgow band Belle and Sebastian, is touring soon, and is undecided what to wear on stage, so is open to sartorial suggestions. Fellow songwriter, Robyn Hitchcock, has a very sensible idea: “A cloak, a cocked hat and a pair of spurs over a plain black outfit, with an orange flower (marigold?) in the hat.”
Drive-in cinema
NOTICING that the Highway Code is being updated to allow movie watching in self-driving cars, the Diary is now trying to figure out which classic flicks would be the most fun to tune into while rolling along the motorway, hands-free.
Reader Andrew Ferguson suggests… Gone With The Winnebago.
Animalistic angst
“DO you know what my pet hate is?” says reader Karen Dunn. “People who have pet hates.”
Read more: Glasgow voter who turned out to be a party pooper
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