Free Glasgow Urban Myths by Ian Black Page B

“NO RADIO”. One day he returned to it to find the window broken anyway. Beside his sign he found a note that read: “Just checking.”

    A student stops by the prof’s office and finds that the professor has stepped out for a moment, leaving an unguarded pile of the next day’s final examinations on his desk. The student quickly steals one of the exams and disappears. Before issuing the exam papers, however, the professor counts them and notices that one is missing. He cuts an eighth of an inch off the bottom of every exam paper prior to distributing them to the class, then fails the student with the long one.

    This next apparently really happened in Bearsden.

    A golfer was angry at his poor playing. He’d hit several balls into the pond on the eighteenth hole. Crimson with frustration and embarrassment, he flung his golf bag into the pond and stormed off the course in front of a crowd of club mates trying not to snigger. A few minutes later, with the crowd watching, he returned to the pond, fished out his bag with the greenkeeper’s rake, retrieved his car keys from the bag and then threw the bag back into the pond.

    A while back, during the construction of the Red Road flats, a worker was having a very hard day. He was being ordered to do work all over the place every second without a break. After eight straight hours of non-stop work, he was extremely tired. A Health and Safety nightmare. The foreman came up to him and told him that a piece of plywood needed to be removed from the roof. The worker grabbed the ladder and climbed to the roof. He had to be careful because the plywood was still in good condition. As he started walking back towards the ladder, he started to worry. He knew he was on a very tall building, and that if he fell it would kill him. So he started to pay more attention to his feet. The weight of the plywood shifted. The worker lost his balance, and fell off the roof. After a moment of panic, he noticed his fall had slowed. The plywood was acting like a parachute, and he was able to safely land on the ground.

    A modern legend tells of a woman from Glasgow who visits Lourdes, famous for its stories of miraculous cures. Although in good health, the woman feels tired on the hot day of her visit, and she sits down in an empty wheelchair to rest, then falls asleep. Waking up when a priest arrives to bless the visitors, the woman jumps up from the chair and is immediately surrounded by a crowd screaming: “It’s a miracle!” In the excitement, the woman was knocked to the ground and her leg was broken.

    A Newton Mearns resident called the fire brigade to request assistance in removing her cat from a tree. The fire brigade responded with a rescue van which had an extension ladder. The tree, however, was too tall and willowy, if a poplar can be willowy, to support the weight of the extension ladder. Rather than send men back to the fire station to bring the aerial ladder truck, one of the firemen suggested an alternative course of action. Two of the firemen supported the ladder while a third climbed high enough to tie a rope around the tree about halfway up.
    The other end of the rope was tied to the tow bar, and the van was slowly driven forward, forcing the tree to bend over. One fireman was poised to grab the cat as soon as it was within his reach.
    The knot securing the rope to the tow bar slipped free.
    The cat was last seen, airborne and yowling, heading towards Prestwick.

    And finally, the myth of bottled water.
    Evian is “naive” spelled backwards, because people who pay two quid for a bottle of water are.

COPYRIGHT
    First published 2006
    by Black & White Publishing Ltd
    29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL
    www.blackandwhitepublishing.com
    This electronic edition published in 2014

    ISBN: 978 1 84502 862 6 in EPub format
    ISBN: 978 1 84502 127 6 in paperback format

    Copyright © Ian Black 2006

    The right of Ian Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by