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BEHAVIOUR is deteriorating at the cinema these days. A reader tells us two women who were chatting away in front of him were still talking when the film started, and he was forced to lean forward, tap one on the shoulder and tell her: "Excuse me, I can't hear."
"I should hope not," she snapped back. "It's a private conversation."
A puzzled look
ONE of the final authors at the Edinburgh Book Festival was Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol, who has written about growing up with such famous parents. Just recently, she said, she arrived at Heathrow Airport where a po-faced immigration officer stared at her and said: "Oh, it's you."
The officer then added: "You were a clue in a crossword puzzle the other day, and I couldn't remember your first name."
Carol's conundrum
WE mentioned ageing rocker Rick Wakeman also speaking at the book festival. A reader tells us Rick was signing books afterwards when a lady asked him: "What did Carol Vorderman make of your genitals?" at which Rick tipped his head back and laughed uproariously.
Our reader craned forward hoping for juicy showbiz gossip, only to discover that Rick had appeared on that great afternoon show Countdown and came up with the seven-letter word "genitals", which presenter Carol then put up on the board for him.
As in a type of gym shoe, of course.
Hamming it up
WE return to our tales of light-fingered staff with a reader telling us about the time he worked in a meat-processing factory when the woman in front of him, who was a bit bulky it has to be said, suddenly dropped a large ham from under her voluminous skirt as she was walking past the gate security staff.
He admired her aplomb as she turned to the staff walking out behind her and shouted: "Right! Which wan o' youse chucked that at me?"
Spy who phoned us
WE note from Sir Sean Connery's book Being A Scot that he reads the Diary
online every morning from his home in the Bahamas. We wish we had known that when we answered the phone a while back to hear that most famous of voices: "Hello, it's Sir Sean Connery here, phoning from the Bahamas. I just wanted to talk to you about one of the stories in the column today."
As it is the most copied voice we know of, we feared a wind-up and were perhaps overly curt with him. Oops.
Poles apart
TALES of spelling remind
Roy Hay, now in Australia,
of playing in a student
football side at East Anglia University where their
Polish winger was being
booked by the ref for a
bad foul.
The Polish player got to the seventh consonant without a vowel in his name when the ref snapped his notebook shut and let him off with a warning.
Hunger pains
"I knew having the
Chinese hosting the Olympics would be a bad idea," said
the chap in the bar the other night.
"It's just finished," he added. "And already I feel like I want another one."
In a jam
FORMER Nazareth guitarist Billy Rankin couldn't help himself from picking up a guitar on Sunday night and jumping on stage to help Gun with their encore at the Tartan Clef Music Awards launch party in Glasgow.
Rankin, now a DJ on Rock Radio, was playing a blinder, or so he thought, with Gun guitar man Joolz, until he jumped off the stage and discovered the guitar he borrowed was not plugged in.
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