VETERAN newspaper photographer Denis Straughan, given a lifetime achievement award this week in the First ScotRail Press Photography Awards, was recalling a previous prize he won for a picture he took at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh - his weight in whisky.

"I had a couple of weeks before the award ceremony so I went on a diet - a diet of chips, beer, pies and more pies.

"I wore a full heavy dress kilt to the ceremony where I was weighed, and even stuffed the sporran with 50p coins.

"The result? Seventy-eight bottles of whisky."

Not quick enough
 INCIDENTALLY, television presenter Stephen Jardine, introducing the awards, said there was one picture that had eluded every press photo-grapher in Scotland last year.

"First Minister Alex Salmond looking modest and self-effacing," said Stephen.



No more cake jokes
 WE should explain to readers abroad on the web that the references to Skoda cars are because of television advertisements showing a life-size Skoda made out of cake.

We will, however, end the Skoda references as, a reader warns, we don't want them to go stale.

But we congratulate Ian Duff of Inverness who manages to squeeze in one of the oldest Glasgow cake-shop gags in existence.

"Rat new caur oanra telly - is it a Skoda, or am ah wrang?" says Ian.



  • FORTUNATELY it means we don't have to mention the Skoda owner who claims his girlfriend lost her cherry in his new car.



Pilot power
 AIRCREW continued. Reader Dave Biggart from Kilmacolm was flying from Copenhagen to Glasgow when he asked a steward if the pilots were Australian, which had been the case the last time he had used the service.

The Scottish steward told him in a low voice: "Naw, it's two women pilots.

"But don't worry - they don't have to reverse it."



Running joke
 WE hope readers would not accuse us of misogyny, but we nevertheless pass on the story of the couple shopping in John Lewis where the wife was looking at one of the sleek, but expensive, home treadmills.

Trying to convince her dubious husband that they should buy it, she told him: "If I used that, I could get back to looking the way I did when I met you."

"It's a treadmill, no' a time machine," he told her.



New Yoke, New Yoke
 BUT to be fair to women, a Perth reader tells us she was on holiday in New York recently with her boyfriend where they were asked in a breakfast diner how they wanted their eggs cooked. The waitress was expecting an American answer such as "sunny side up" or "over easy" or whatever.

Our reader laughed like a drain when her boyfriend, not knowing what the waitress meant, but not wanting to show his male ignorance, eventually blurted out: "Medium rare."



Happy Clattys
 NEWS that west end bar complex Oran Mor is to have a monthly Clatty Pat's night in memory of the legendary, but now defunct, nightclub much loved by nurses and the inebriated, makes reader John Di Paola suggest: "Oran Mor is famous for its alliterations, such as A Play A Pie and A Pint.

"Will the Clatty Pat nights be known as A Grolsch, A Groove and A Grope?"



Game of two hearths
 A LISTENER claims that England captain Rio Ferdinand, was interviewed on Five Live, where Ryan Giggs taking over as captain from an injured Gary Neville at Manchester United was discussed. Or as Rio put it: "Giggsy has stepped in and taken up the mantelpiece."