Pun fun

JOURNALISTS are rightly celebrated for our numerous engaging characteristics. Our work ethic. (We work several minutes a day, some of them even consecutive.) Our abstemious natures. (We never order a drink at the pub. Instead, we patiently wait for a non-journalist chum to order, then request a quadruple whisky with a champagne chaser.) Perhaps our most adorable quality is our ability to cobble a pun together at the drop of a hat.

The Diary has now discovered that young scallywags have been impinging on our territory by inventing their own puns.

Reader Simon Leitch informs us that his son plays a football-based computer game on his mobile phone, where competitors use pun-based pseudonyms based on footy players they are particularly fond of.

Which has inspired Simon’s son to dub himself… Neymar Foodinthefridge.

A piggy tale

RETIRED primary teacher Margaret Ralston gave her young charges numerous invaluable lessons in life, and provided answers to their many questions.

Though she admits that there was one curious scholar who asked a question that left Margaret stumped.

Said the little fellow: “If Scottish folk call a dog a dug, why don’t we also call a hog a hug?”

Liquid laffs

WE recently mentioned an eminent Victorian novelist and his most famous creation, a little workhouse lad, turned clumsy pickpocket.

Which inspires reader John Hutchison to regale us with a rib-tickling yarn.

“Charles Dickens walks into a bar and orders a martini,” says John. “The barman asks: ‘Olive or twist?’"

Mathematical mating

UNLUCKY in love reader Kathleen Gibson gets in touch to tell us: “The graph of my past relationships has an Ex axis and a Why axis.”

Dear John

THE ego has landed. We recently challenged our readers with The Magnificent Seven Test, where they had to attempt to read an entire Diary column while still remembering the name of the least famous actor in the cowboy flick The Magnificent Seven. (A bloke called Brad Thingummy, we seem to recall.) Regular contributor John Mulholland gets in touch with an outrageous confession.

“I failed the test,” he admits. “Not because I can’t remember things I’ve read. It’s just that when I start reading a Diary story, I immediately skip to the next one if there’s no mention in the first two lines of the name John Mulholland.”

(Bloomin’ cheek. From now on the Diary’s referring to him as John Thingummy.)

Half-baked humour

“I ENTERED a baking competition and came in last,” sighs reader Pauline Ferguson. “It was a worst cake scenario.”