ROY Hay in Australia tells us of a local club where members were taking part in a charity parachute jump. As part of their training, the instructor was telling them to prepare themselves for landing once they were about 90 metres from the ground.

"How do you know you are at 90 metres?" asked one woman.

"A good question," replied the instructor. "At 90 metres you can recognise the faces of people on the ground."

The woman thought about this for a while before asking: "What happens if there's no-one there you know?"

Home help
TEXAN singer songwriter Kimmie Rhodes, who played support to Emmylou Harris in Glasgow the other day, has her husband and son in her backing group.

Or, as she put it as she introduced the band: "My mother always told me I should use whatever was lyin' around the house."

Stock exchange
A SUITED chap in Rick's Bar in Edinburgh was expressing his surprise at the speed of Spanish bank Santander's takeover of Bradford & Bingley.

"That's because nobody," interjected his colleague, "expects the Spanish acquisition."

Quack crack
"SHE'S that stupid," said a woman chatting about a mutual friend in a west end bar at the weekend, "that she probably throws breadcrumbs in the toilet bowl to feed the toilet duck."

Tears of a clown
DOCTOR turned stand-up comedian Paul Sinha, appearing at The Stand Comedy Club on Sunday as part of Glasgay!, loves coming to Glasgow despite what happened to him last year. He had finished a gig at the Jongleurs club, had many beers with the audience and then decided, instead of going to his hotel across the road, to seek out a late-night kebab shop.

While in the shop a mass brawl developed outside, and a stranger punched Paul in the face.

He tells us: "The police tried to be helpful, but their earnest attempts to investigate what they were treating as a racial incident were rather undermined by my lack of memory, slurred speech and pathetic sobbing."

This time Paul has vowed to go straight back to his hotel, then added: "Which is a shame, because the kebab was actually pretty good."

Scholar in the gents
BEFORE we close the lid on toilet graffiti, we pass on from Ninian Fergus a more surreal example when Lisbon Lion Bertie Auld was manager of Hibs. In the toilet of a pub near the Hibs ground someone had scrawled: "Did you realise that Bertie Auld is an anagram of Auld Bertie?"

GSOH
HOUSE names continued. Peter Flanagan in Dunoon remembers that when he grew up in Davidson's Mains, Edinburgh, there was a house called Myobb. It allowed the owner the cheap laugh of saying, when asked what it meant, "Mind your own bloody business."

Not so fast
SINGER David Essex returns to Glasgow's King's Theatre in November in his new musical All The Fun of the Fair in which he plays a funfair owner - so not a rip off of his hit film That'll Be The Day then.

Anyway, we are still smiling at David's last concert appearance in Glasgow when a middle-aged fan motioned to him to hold his wrist down from the stage so that she could clip on a glow-in the-dark bracelet.

She took so long that David looked down and asked: "You're not trying to steal my watch are you?"

Diplomatic immunity
OUR mention of driving test oddities reminds Kati Sellar of sitting her test in Britain while she had a valid Finnish driving licence, so was able to drive to the test centre on her own.

She failed the test, and then quite legally drove home.