This could be the last place you ever visit...
Talking bull
As our regular readers know, the Diary is fascinated by the English language.
Occasionally we've even attempted to communicate using it, though we don't recommend that amateur linguists should stumble into such a thorny forest, where wolfish nouns and ravenous adjectives are lurking.
Diary correspondent Campbell Thompson informs us of the definition of the word 'avoidable'.
'It's what a matador attempts to do,' reports Campbell.
Clocking off
We sympathise with this comment on social media from Glasgow actor, musician and one-time River City fan-favourite Tom Urie: '1985: I can't wait to see what the world looks like in 40 years! 2025: I miss 1985.'
Phoney message
We continue with our tales of time travel. (See above.)
This time we're spinning and whirling backwards through the decades, instead of forward.
In yesterday's Diary we mentioned a poor teenager who was left feeling bereft when his phone ran out of charge while he was no where near a plug socket.
We are now told that whenever this happens to the teenage daughter of reader Debbie Harvey, she says to the grieving youngster in the sing-song tones of an aeroplane pilot: 'Welcome to the year 1999. Please enjoy your stay.'
Debbie's daughter does not find this amusing. Not in the least.
Donkey days
Time Travel: Chapter 3.
The Diary is celebrating the pungent smells of childhood that instantly take us back to the glorious days of our readers' youth. (Very much in the same way that nibbling on a madeleine cake transported the narrator of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, back to his formative years.)
Bert Houliston says: 'The scents from my childhood in Saltcoats would have to include Granpaw's Jaicket, a heady mixture of stale pipe tobacco, spilt beer, and spittle laced with mint imperials.
'Also Wet Dug; Seaside Donkey; and the Midden at Twilight.'
Handy advice
Dire warning of the day from reader Frank Gunn, who gets in touch to say: 'I don't care how wonderful the hand soap smells, you should never walk out of a bathroom smelling your fingers.'
Glass glancing
Staring out his living room window the other morning, reader Samuel Booth concluded: 'Looks like we're in for a bad spell of wheather.'
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