Glasgow Urban Myths

by Ian Black

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Think you’re smart, pal?

  At Glasgow University during an examination one day, a bright young history student laid down his pen and asked his examiner to bring him a stoup of red wine.

  Examiner: “Eh?”

  Student: “I formally request that you bring me a stoup of red wine.”

  Examiner: “Sorry, laddie, no red or any other coloured wine for you.”

  Student: “Seriously, I really must insist. I request and require that you bring me a stoup of red wine.”

  At this point, the student produced a copy of the foundation document of 1451, written partially in Latin and still nominally in effect, and pointed to the section which read (rough translation from the Latin): “Gentlemen sitting examinations may request and require a stoup of red wine.”

  The examiners hemmed and hawed, and no one had any idea how much a stoup held, but nobody was getting on with their exams, and he said he would settle for a large glass of red wine. The exam recommenced, he was supplied with his stoup, and sat smugly slurping away, a minor master of beating the system.

  The following day the university authorities fined him five Scots pounds for not wearing a sword. And nobody knew how much that was either.

  A Glasgow gangster, Paddy Maguire, blags a considerable sum from his employers and takes off for the Costa del Plenty, where he goes to ground. No one can find him. This is because he is dead, and the going to ground is literal, as in into the ground. Do not steal from Glasgow gangsters.

  He has, however, left a large chunk of this loot with his ever-loving wife, who is freaked out by the event and scared at the amount of the money. In her paranoia she spends huge amounts on security. No other house in Glasgow has this level of burglar and assault-proofedness. The gravel on the path is electrified. There are radars, sonars, automatic machine guns, landmines, guards. There are alarms on the alarms. This house is better protected than the Crown jewels.

  She comes down one morning to find a car in her living room, not a big one, just one of the new Volkswagens, but there is no sign of any kind as to how it got there. The doors of the room are normal sized, no alarms have rung. She opens the door of the car and finds a letter, nicely handwritten, on the dashboard. It says: “Mrs Maguire, when we want our money back, we’ll ask for it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A couple of bum notes and a bad joke

  A Glasgow couple are up in Glenshee, with a group of friends, giving it laldy on the ski slopes. Conditions are just about perfect, wind whistling, cold as a witch’s tit, no feeling in the toes, basic numbness all over. All in all, a “Tell me when we’re having a good time” kind of day.

  The woman complained to her husband that she was in dire need of a toilet, as the cold was getting to her. He told her not to worry, that he was sure there was relief waiting at the top of the lift in the form of a loo for female skiers in distress. He was wrong, of course, and the pain did not go away. Leg-crossing was losing its effect.

  When you hear the siren call of nature going “Now! Now! Now!” you know that a temperature of below zero doesn’t help matters. So, with time running out, the woman weighed up her options.

  Her husband, picking up on the intensity of the pain, suggested that since she was wearing an all-white ski outfit, she should go off behind a tree. No one would even notice, he assured her. The white will provide more than adequate camouflage. So she headed for the trees, disrobed and proceeded to do her thing. If you’ve ever parked on the side of a slope, then you know there is a right way and wrong way to set up your skis so you don’t move. Yep, you got it. She had them positioned the wrong way.

  Steep slopes are not forgiving, even during embarrassing moments. Without warning, the woman found herself skiing backwards, out of control, racing through the trees, somehow missing all of them, and into another slope. Her bum and the rest were still bare, her salopettes and knickers down around her knees, and she was picking up speed all the while.

  She continued proceeding in a backward direction, creating an unusual vista for the other skiers. The poor woman skied, if you define that verb loosely, back under the lift and finally collided violently with a pylon. The bad news was that she broke her arm and was unable to pull up her trousers. When her husband finally arrived, and put an end to her nude show, they called staff and an ambulance, which transported her to hospital.

  In the ward after the painkillers she was getting her head together when a man with an obviously broken leg was put in the bed next to hers.

  “How did you break your leg?” she asked.

  “It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I was riding up in the ski lift, and suddenly I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was this mad woman skiing backward down the slope with her bare bum hanging out and her trousers down around her knees.

  “I leaned over to get a better look and I just didn’t realize how far I’d moved. I fell out of the lift. How did you break your arm?”

  At her wedding reception in a Glasgow hotel a bride decided to play a joke on her new husband. He was a devoted follower of the lottery and stuck to the same numbers every week, so she handed a copy of his numbers to the DJ and asked him to read them out at a certain point in the evening.

  At the allotted time, the DJ paused the celebrations to announce the winning lottery numbers. The husband as normal checked his lottery ticket, and with loud shouts of joy raced to the bar and ordered the bar staff to serve free champagne all round.

  Alarmed at the speed her husband and the guests were drinking, the bride asked her husband to join her on stage for an announcement. The husband leapt on stage, grabbed the mike and started to make a speech.

  “I would like to thank you all for being here to celebrate this wondrous occasion where I have been so blessed – not once but twice”. Turning to his new wife and clutching his lottery ticket he said: “I have something to confess to you – for the past six months I have been having an affair with your sister and we are leaving together tonight.”

  It was left to the DJ to explain the joke to the husband after the wife had collapsed on stage.

  A Bearsden man was working on his motorbike on the patio and his wife was in the house in the kitchen. The man was racing the engine on the bike and somehow it slipped into gear. The man, still holding the handlebars, was dragged through a glass patio door and the motorbike dumped on the floor inside the house. The wife, hearing the crash, ran into the room and found her husband lying on the floor, cut and bleeding, the motorcycle lying next to him and the patio door shattered. The wife ran to the phone and summoned an ambulance. Because they lived on a fairly large hill, the wife went down the several flights of long steps to the street to direct the paramedics to her husband.

  After the ambulance arrived and transported the husband to the hospital, the wife righted the motorcycle and pushed it outside. Seeing that petrol had spilled on the floor, the wife got some paper towels and blotted up the petrol.

  The husband was treated at the hospital and was released to come home. When he got back he looked at the shattered patio door and the damage done to his bike. He became depressed and thought he’d cheer himself up with a smoke. He went into the bathroom, sat on the loo and smoked a cigarette. After finishing the cigarette, he flipped it between his legs into the toilet bowl while still seated. The wife, who was in the kitchen, heard a loud explosion and her husband screaming. She had of course thrown the petrol-soaked paper towels in the toilet.

  She broke into the bathroom and found her husband lying on the floor. His trousers had been blown away and he was suffering burns on the buttocks, the back of his legs and his groin. The wife again ran to the phone and called for an ambulance. The same ambulance crew was dispatched and the wife met them at the street. The paramedics loaded the husband on to the stretcher and began carrying him to the street.

  While they were going down the stairs to the street accompanied by the wife, one of the paramedics asked the wi
fe how the husband had burned himself. She told them and the paramedics started laughing so hard, one of them tipped the stretcher and dumped the husband out. He fell down the remaining steps and broke his ankle.

  He got a very nice new bike out of the damages.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Not so daft,

  and you must be choking, surely

  A young woman was driving alone one night near the local asylum when she heard on the radio that a dangerous man had escaped. Within minutes she heard a pop and felt one of her tyres go flat. Her moby had run out of juice, so she got herself together, built up her nerve and got out and began to change the tyre. Just as she slid the spare wheel on she noticed a man in a plain white uniform staring at her from the bushes. Startled, she dropped the wheel nuts and heard them scatter on the ground. As she vainly searched in the darkness for the scattered nuts she heard the man slowly approaching. Terrified, she asked herself in a trembling voice: “What am I going to do now?” and the patient replied, “Why don’t you take one nut from each of the other wheels and put them on the spare?” She did, and was soon on her way.

  A woman from Bearsden saw a blind man picking his way through a crowd and went over to help. The two started to talk and the man asked her if she could deliver the letter he held in his hand to the address on the envelope. She was passing that address on the way home anyway, so she agreed.

  She started out to deliver the message, when she turned around to see if there was anything else the blind man needed. But she spotted him hurrying through the crowd without his dark glasses or white cane. She went to the police, who raided the address on the envelope, where they found organs, limbs and entire bodies, a veritable charnel house.

  The women opened the envelope to see what it said, and it was:

  “This is the last one I am sending you today.”

  A Drumchapel woman came home from shopping up the toon to find her Dobermann choking on something. She quickly put him in the car and drove him to the vet. The vet told her to go home while he operated to remove whatever was lodged in the dog’s windpipe and he’d ring to tell her when she could pick up her pet. She wasn’t home for long when the vet called and told her in an excited voice to get out of the house right now and he’d be there to explain in a few minutes. From her neighbour’s window she saw the vet arrive with the police and ran out to see if her dog was all right and what was going on. As the police ran into her house the vet told her what her loving pet had choked on, two human fingers. The police found an escaped murderer hiding in the hall cupboard nursing his mangled hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Some things that people in my pub have sworn to me are true.

  Some of them believe all of these.

  Cabbage Patch kids were modelled after mentally defective children to get people used to what children would look like after a nuclear war.

  If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of tea.

  If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas would be produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.

  The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out of the body to squirt blood 30 feet.

  A pig’s orgasm lasts 30 minutes.

  A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.

  Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

  The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off.

  The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football pitch.

  An octopus has over 27,000 taste buds.

  Some lions mate over 50 times a day.

  Butterflies taste with their feet.

  The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

  Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.

  An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

  Starfish have no brains.

  Titanic facts?

  The construction of the ship went at such a fast pace that at least one worker was accidentally walled up in the hull and left to die.

  Workers in Belfast almost stopped construction of the ship because the hull number 3909 04 seemed to spell out “NO POPE” when viewed in a mirror.

  A cursed mummy that had already caused several deaths was in the cargo hold when the ship sank.

  The Titanic was the first ship to use SOS as a distress call.

  A tooth left overnight in a glass of Coca-Cola will dissolve.

  Washing your feet with vodka cures foot odour.

  You can turn vodka into mouthwash using a cup of vodka, 9 tablespoons of cinnamon and an airtight container to seal it up in for two weeks. After you strain out the cinnamon you have mouthwash.

  After hearing screams from a Glasgow hotel room, a man broke in and found a naked woman tied to a bed. Her boyfriend was unconscious on the floor, dressed as Superman. He’d hit his head during the sex game and left her helpless.

  The wax used to line the cups of instant noodles will build up in your internal organs causing serious problems later in life.

  There was a brand of diet pills that contained the heads of tapeworms. Inside people’s bodies they’d regenerate and the people would immediately begin to lose weight. The only way to get rid of the worms, once infested, is to starve for days then sit a bowl of warm milk in front of you and open your mouth. The hungry worms can smell it and will crawl up your throat and out into the milk.

  The two about vodka are true.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Blind dates

  The man who worked in the big Boots in Sauchiehall Street was getting tired of watching the nervous teenager wander around the store so he asked if he could help him. The boy stammered a little and the sales assistant pulled some condoms from behind the counter and asked if that was what he was looking for.

  The teenager eventually said it was. The amused man told the boy not to worry, he was sure he’d do fine. He gave him some words of encouragement, wished him luck and told him with a wink, “I’m counting on you to become a regular customer.” That evening as the young man approached the door of his new girlfriend’s house he was thankful for the advice the man in the shop had given him, but his confidence quickly disappeared when he rang the bell and his girlfriend’s father, the sales assistant, answered the door.

  An attractive young woman was taking a shower one day and the doorbell started ringing. She jumped out to get it, but couldn’t find a towel to wrap herself in. As she headed for the bedroom to grab something, she yelled: “Who’s there?” The voice called out: “It’s a blind man.” The woman thought he wanted to sell some pencils, Jaycloths or something and stopped, realizing that she didn’t have to get any of her clothes wet, he couldn’t see her anyway. When she opened the door a wide-eyed man in grey overalls asked her, “Eh, where do you want me to put your blinds?”

  A man and his wife were supposed to go to a fancy-dress party together one Halloween, but when the time came to go the woman told him to go on without her, she had a terrible headache. The man reluctantly did, and the suspicious wife decided to see just how faithful her man really was. She put on a different costume and went to the party. When she got there and she saw her husband dancing with a young girl in a sexy costume she got even more suspicious, and she decided to really put him to the test. She danced with him and whispered that they should sneak into a bedroom.

  She insisted they leave the masks on and had sex with him, then fuming, she ran home to wait for his return. When he got there she innocently asked if he’d enjoyed himself. He told her he hadn’t. He said he’d had one dance with one of their son’s teachers and that after a few minutes he and a couple of guys he met at the party had gone across the street to a pub to watch the football. He added, “The bloke who borrowed my costume said he had a really good t
ime, though!”

  A couple were celebrating an anniversary and had rented exactly the same room they had stayed in on their honeymoon. When they got there it was pretty much the same except for a little wear and tear. It had the round bed and mirrors on the ceiling just like their previous visit.

  They had, however, added a little machine that would allow you to watch porn movies on the telly, and as his wife changed for bed the man decided to check it out. A few minutes into the second scene he realized it had been filmed in the room they were staying in, and had stayed in during their honeymoon. Then he realized it was their honeymoon.

  Wee Davie had stayed out too late again and was afraid his wife would be angry. On the way home he decided he’d sneak in the window and ravish her before she had a chance to be angry or notice the time.

  All went as planned and afterward he went downstairs to get a snack from the kitchen and saw his wife on the couch in the living room. “What are you doing down here?” he asked. “Ssssshhhh! Keep it down. Your mother’s upstairs asleep in our bed!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR