Food for thought

GORDON Ramsay is perhaps the world’s finest ranter. His finger-wagging fury is operatic in its opulence, with the celebrity chef regularly soaring to Wagnerian levels of bombast, boom and bluster. Alas, poor Gordon is now the one facing the music. A diner was not happy with the small portion of food he received in one of his restaurants. An irate TripAdvisor review followed, and plenty of bad publicity.

The Diary has vowed never to serve up dinky portions to our readers. In today’s classic selection from our vaults you’ll find many courses to sate your appetite, all from our a la carte menu of Diary daftness. We start with an amuse-bouche. A reader once asked, why is there no other word for synonym?

The hole truth

WE recall a Glasgow workman called Archie who was given the job of labouring on a building site. The foreman left him to dig a trench while he visited another site. On his return a few hours later, he was less than impressed with Archie’s progress. “Is that all the dirt you’ve dug out of the trench?” he asked, to which Archie replied: “That’s all the dirt that was in it.”

East/west divide

THE difference between Glasgow and Edinburgh was summed up for a reader who moved to Edinburgh from Glasgow, and shortly afterwards was chatting to her new neighbour over the garden fence. Eventually the neighbour suggested: “Would you like to come round for coffee?”

“That would be nice,” said our lady from Glasgow, who was about to gather up her children for the visit.

“How about a week on Thursday?” the Edinburgh lady continued.

Burning question

A HAMILTON reader watched a street-performer in Aberdeen who enthralled his audience by juggling lit torches. She added: “Everyone was watching in awe at a safe distance when a tramp broke the circle and went right up to him, fag in mouth, and asked the immortal line, ‘Have ye got a light, son?’”

Flight of fancy

A GLASGOW reader told us his son Jack got a job as a member of an airline’s cabin crew. When he returned home after his first few weeks in the job, he explained that the only downside was the number of passengers who actually thought it was funny, when they saw his name tag, to say “Hi Jack” to him as they boarded the plane.

Video nasty

BACK in the days before Netflix and DVDs, a Glasgow mother told us she was surprised and delighted when her teenage son brought home the video of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. At last the lad had discovered his more sensitive side, she thought. Alas, no. After a few minutes watching, he gave up in disgust, explaining that he had assumed it was a follow up to Dumb and Dumber.

Cutting comment

WE admired the linguistic dexterity of a BBC employee in a Glasgow west-end bar who was explaining to a chap who asked what she did for a living that she was a film editor. When asked what that involved, she told him: “Well, to cut a long story short…”