Revealed: the shop where you should be able to keep a stiff upper lip
Though only if you happen to be the school janitor, and you can hide inside the broom cupboard, huddled behind a mop, bucket and squeegee, until all the scallywag scholars have ripped the classrooms apart, beaten each other up, then barged through the school gates at the end of the day, eager to continue their reign of rampage upon arriving home.
Christina Anderson taught English in an unruly Glasgow school in the 1980s, and once asked a pupil, a fearsome little tyke, what he wanted to do when (or indeed if) he grew up.
The fearsome tyke considered this question for a philosophical moment, then replied: 'Me, miss? I wanna dae wit I dae best in school. Only, get paid for it, likes.'
'And what would that be?' inquired Christina.
'I wanna be a paid agitator,' said the tyke.
'I was both horrified and impressed,' Christina tells the Diary. 'Horrified that he wanted to continue his terrorising ways into adulthood. And impressed that he knew a word like agitator.'
Going for green
'I once spotted Ronnie O'Sullivan in my local garden centre,' says reader Jim Winston. 'I assumed he was looking at a plant."
Weather warning
The Diary is a big fan of nominative determinism, those strange occurrences when a person's given name seems to inspire the profession they take up.
A few years ago reader Steven Arnold was holidaying in the USA.
Clearly bored with all the activities you can do in that huge and beguiling country (visiting the Grand Canyon, getting mugged in New York, being eaten by sharks while enjoying a dip off Martha's Vinyard) he decided to stay indoors and watch the local news on the hotel tellybox.
Once the crime, chaos and despair was done and dusted, the weatherman appeared, a chap who went by the tempestuous name of… what else?... Storm Field.
Condiment conundrum
Let's stick State-side for a while.
Nick Hook told a pal he was going on a business trip to Salt Lake City, which inspired his pal to admit: 'I've always wondered why there isn't a Pepper Lake City next door.'
Groan-up
Another horror story from the adult world.
Andy Dempsey's young grandson asked what it was like being a grown-up.
'Not bad,' said Andy, 'if you can put up with always doing stuff you hate doing, until you die.'
Absolutely silly
'I don't believe in absolutes,' says reader Peter Miller, 'and never will.'
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