THE DIARY

GIVEN recent events at a wellknown hotel, there was an interesting front-page headline in yesterday’s House & Home, the property section of The Courier, spotted by Olivia Currie.

Getaway at Gleneagles, it reads.

POLITICO Europe tweets an observation by Our Man in the Brexit Negotiations, one David Davis MP, to the effect that Brexit is more difficult than the Moon landing. “Difference is we actually got to the Moon”, is the caustic response from actor/writer Mark Gatiss. (Thanks to Foster Evans for this one).

WOULD it be unkind, Joe McLaughlin wonders, to say that Ruth Davidson has been well and truly Duped by her leader ?

THE ink was hardly dry, as it were, on David Ross’s exclusive heraldscotland report yesterday – “Canadian PM Justin Trudeau to visit Scotland next week to meet the Queen” – before Bruce Skivington was emailing to ask: “Which Queen? Nicola or Ruth?”

Crime writer Ian Rankin, learning that Mr Trudeau would be in Edinburgh, tweets that he has put a drink behind the Oxford Bar, “just on the off-chance ... ”

GORDON Shepherd says: “We were touring Ireland in the car when we had to ask a farmer for directions. We were told: ‘Go right ahead all the way to the T junction and your road is half-a-mile back on the left’.”

Gordon also recalls a rugby trip to Dublin during which they ended up in a museum some distance from the city centre.

They weren’t all that keen on walking back, so they asked the colleen at reception where the nearest bus stop could be found.

Her directions were quite complicated, the stop being a fair distance away. She began to look a little troubled and finally blurted out, “Do you have a car?”

GOOD to know that the poshoven people have opened a restaurant in, of all places, Glasgow’s Dundas Street.