Smooth as silk

WE were stunned when a check with the Electoral Commission revealed that the leader of permatanned Robert Kilroy-Silk's new party, Veritas, is, in fact, Tony Bennett. No doubt we can soon hear Kilroy-Silk singing the Tony Bennett classic If I Ruled the World.

Further investigation, however, reveals that this Tony Bennett is in fact Kilroy-Silk's researcher who presumably ticked the wrong box when he was having the party registered. Cynics will no doubt say that the possibility of Veritas being successful is covered by that other Tony Bennett classic Blue Moon.

Ready to swing

LOOK out your kaftans, you old hippies, as Country Joe, anti-war singing star of Woodstock some 26 years ago, is coming to Scotland for the Belladrum Tartan Heart Music Festival in August, which is run on Joe and Leonie Gibbs's gardens near Beauly, to raise money for the Maggie Centre in Inverness.

Next-door neighbour is Stagecoach founder Ann Gloag at Beaufort Castle who plans to turn her grounds into a championship golf course with exclusive lodges.

Joe Gibbs tells us: "I'm just wondering how Country Joe's 'Gimme an F' will go down with a whole load of punters who think grass is something you putt on."

Driven mad

DIRECTOR Paul Brunton borrowed a Lada car for publicity photographs for Borderline Theatre Company's production of Passing Places about two guys stealing a Lada to go surfing. As Paul drove behind the Lada out into the wilds behind Cumbernauld, his hire car began making strange whirring noises, and the temperature gauge went off the scale.

The photoshoot ended with Paul's hire car being towed back to Glasgow by the muchmaligned Lada.

As he tells us: "Being towed back to the Lada owner's house to fix the fan belt was a humiliating experience - particularly as we were there to shoot the Lada breaking down."

15-love

WE asked for your romantic Valentine stories, and Calum McLennan in Qatar tells us about a friend in Irvine going home on Valentine's Day to be met by his lingerie-clad wife who whispered in his ear: "Say something really dirty."

"Kitchen, " he replied.

But enough of such nonsense. Back in the real world, Anne Wright tells us that her husband had complained about the commercialisation of Valentine's Day, suggested they do without presents, and then surprised her by coming home on the day with a large bouquet.

Says Anne: "Turns out he had been in a taxi that afternoon and the driver asked him what he had bought the wife for Valentine's Day. Hubby duly explained that we had agreed to ignore it this year.

"She lied, " said the cabbie.

In a similar vein, Thomas Baldwin in Berwick tells us: "I once heard musician Phil Cunningham mention 'the Scotsman who loved his wife so much he almost told her'."

Well collared

A NATION divided by a common language. The Ohio jail holding Edinburgh man Kenny Richey on death row boasts on its website that prisoners can take dogs that are about to be put down and retrain them "in basic skills such as housebreaking".

Our American correspondent tells us that this, of course, is teaching them not to wee on the carpet, rather than putting a shoulder to a door.

It's sarong or right

ANDY Bishop tells us about a Rotarian dinner in Milngavie where a rather pass-remarkable chap, admiring the buxom waitress, declared:

"Wow, is she wearing a bra or is she not?"

A visiting Englishman at the table, who had been struggling with Scottish idioms, asked: "I know what a bra is - but what's a shenot?"

"A top half of a sarong, " volunteered a fellow diner in a moment of inspiration.

Show goes on

COUNTRY music entrepreneur Merle Kilgore, author of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, who died last week, once promoted a Little Richard concert in Shreveport, Louisiana, 50 years ago, which sold out to an enthusiastic audience - only four of whom realised the singer was not, in fact, Little Richard, who'd failed to show, and asked for their money back.

"Until then, " Merle later recalled, "I'd believed it was bad that few folks in Louisiana watched TV."