COULD it happen here? Heritage enthusiasts in Glasgow next month are to run open-top bus tours of the notorious Easterhouse estate.
The sprawl of deprivation has a historic past, to when the chart-topping Frankie Vaughan came up to encourage boys clubs there and, further back, to the Iron Age. Easterhouse became a breeding ground for iron-hard men.
Can we envisage bus tours of
Muirhouse, Broomhouse, Wester Hailes, Pilton, the Grange, Granton and Leith? Cheap day tickets could lead to standing room only.
No 15 .. or a 99? Talking buses . . .from a distance it looked to me more like an ice cream van than a Lothian bus as it approached Bruntsfield. The colour threw me. Peculiar to the 15s, the company's operations director Bill Campbell explains.
"We bought half a dozen of this particular type in the Nineties, used originally as airport coaches and now we use them on the 15s route. With their livery, they stand out. They'll have been phased out by next year, sold on the second-hand market. Conversion to ice cream vans was never considered."
Meantime, next time you see a 15 and fancy a cone, stop it, try to buy one and see what happens. With raspberry if you're lucky.
For the chop Free-eze! Here's a word in the ear of those idiots planning to venture into the Cairngorms and other Scottish hellholes this winter in their cardigans and carpet slippers. Much less chance the RAF will come and get you. A fifth of their search-and-rescue choppers are being sent by the shameless MoD to Afghanistan. Stay home. Or contact your nearest asylum and have them lock you up for the duration for your own safety.
Afterwords . . . . The good news for the legions of listeners to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, the panel game that died in April along with its chairman since 1972, Humphrey Lyttelton, is that the Beeb are to exhume it next year.
The bad is that front runners listed to fill Humph's shoes include Pam Ayres and Sandi Toksvig. Can this be true? Spare us.
The full article contains 358 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
