Taking the biscuit
THE Diary is obsessed with the Tory leadership contest, and no wonder, with such charisma on display.
First there’s Rishi Sunak, who has the magnetic intensity of a trainee call centre manager with his very own cubicle to work from; who occasionally shows a devil-may-care streak by loosening his tie on Friday afternoons and nabbing an extra Caramel Log from the communal biscuit tin in the canteen… the scamp!
Liz Truss has slightly less oomph, though she makes up for her shortcomings with an impressive ability to deliver a speech as though she’s reciting a haiku written entirely in Morse code.
The Diary also has its fair share of magnetic personalities, as the following classic tales from our archives prove.
So brace yourself for pulse-pounding yarns about librarians, bus passengers, pet owners and shoppers.
And if all of that sounds a tad too thrilling, you can always calm down with our more relaxing story about a cruel and unyielding dictator from East Asia…
Brought to book
ONE of our readers had a poetry-loving chum who visited his library and requested a book on Burns. He was told to go to the first aid section. The same reader had a sister-in-law who worked in a library as a student. The most interesting bookmark she found was a slice of uncooked bacon.
Flavour most foul
“I’M on these tablets,” said a chap in a Glasgow pub, “which lists amongst the possible side-effects that I might lose all sense of taste.”
He then added: “True enough, the next day I started watching Love Island on the telly.”
Teeth-grating
A READER on a Glasgow bus heard a young chap tell his pal that his trip to the dentist the previous day had been “really painful”. When his mate asked what they had done to him, he replied: “They were playing a Phil Collins CD all the time I was there.”
Jong at heart
A BBC Scotland reporter told us she managed to read the name of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il without mispronouncing it. So what, you might think. But she tells us of a fellow broadcaster who read the name out as Kim Jong the Second.
The old problem
A RENFREWSHIRE reader was buying a birthday card, and says: “Is it perhaps a sign of the deteriorating life expectancy in the west of Scotland that on a recent search for an age 70 birthday card in SemiChem in Johnstone the range of birthday cards did not extend past 30?”
Hardcore hound
“DOGS are tough,” a reader informed us. “When I went home the other night I interrogated our pooch for over an hour, but he still wouldn’t tell me who’s a good boy.”
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