AVOIDING the exciseman continued. A reader who once worked as a sub-contractor in a Glasgow plant that bottled Gordon's gin tells us that there were bottles hidden everywhere from which workers partook at their leisure.

He was given a paper cup filled with gin and Irn Bru, and in his naivity said he preferred his gin with tonic.

"How do you think it would look at security," he was asked, "if we came into a gin bottling plant with bottles of tonic?"

So Irn Bru it was, then.

Number's up
WE are told about the Glasgow south-sider whose car was broken into and driven away in broad daylight at the weekend. A couple of kids from further down the street excitedly rang her buzzer to tell her they saw her car disappear with someone other than her driving.

Despite her anguish she had to smile when one of them told her: "We got the licence plate number!"

Buzz off
THE GOOD weather means the buzz of lawnmowers around the country once again.

Donald Grant in Paisley recalls when rotary Flymos first came out in the early 1960s, and as he used one at his first "bought hoose" a chap passing from the nearby corpy scheme told his mate: "Noo ah've seen it a' - they bloody toffee-nosed lot even Hoover their grass."

Lost in translation
OUR tales of language misunderstandings remind David Porter in Hamilton of when he was doing the Herald crossword on his lunchbreak, and the French for ear formed part of the clue.

He phoned a French exchange student in another part of the building and when he was asked what was the French for ear, he immediately replied: "Ici."

Fan mail
AUTHOR Susan Hill, who wrote the Rebecca follow-up Mrs de Winters, has a number of her novels used for GCSE and A-level examinations.

She wondered about the folk sitting the exams when she received an e-mail from one scholar that stated: "hi yal made a gr8 book ere keep it up yes suzan me main man."