"I used to live by the dockside near Partick, as in where Partick Thistle FC come from," said Billy Connolly on a television show once. "I say Partick Thistle FC," he emphasised, "as most Englishmen think they're called Partick Thistle Nil."
If any football team could provoke the same indulgent sigh spurred by the sight of a kitten climbing out of a Wellington boot, that team would have to be Partick Thistle. They're the football club you can support between meals without ruining your appetite, a plucky, lovable, hopeless bunch from the pages of a 1930s comic for boys. Disliking Partick Thistle would be like setting your pit bull on Postman Pat. As a non-aligned, community-integrated concern, Thistle strive to be everything that nasty, modern, money-grubbing football clubs aren't.
And they've done it again. Yesterday, Thistle played Dundee at Firhill, their ground in Glasgow, but with free entry given to students from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. The aim was to help undergraduates from overseas acclimatise to the city, though the offer might also have exposed the fact, as so many Thistle games end up doing, that King Lear and Hamlet are far from the last word in tragedy.
"Where better to start that education than at a Glasgow football match?" said Maggie Kinloch, vice-principal of the RSAMD. The odd thing, of course, is that football fans and the Walter Softys who attend talent schools are two distinct breeds. But Allan Cowan, chairman of Partick Thistle, had an answer there: "We've always had the reputation of being a club with more than our fair share of fans from the world of show business."
Or certainly more than their fair share of nervous notables who know that expressing their preference for either one of the city's two biggest football teams might make their lives that bit harder. For the aspirant thesps, it's a useful lesson in Glasgow-think indeed.
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That classic Scottish ability to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory is demonstrated superbly by how we've chosen to play six degrees of biblical separation. Many cultures west of Jerusalem possess myths and legends suggesting that star names from the Big Book at one time made personal appearances in their neck of the woods. The south of France, for instance, was the supposed destination of Mary Magdalene after Jesus's death; the Three Wise Men - for reasons that seem to cast some doubt upon their wisdom - ended up in Cologne, apparently. And who did we get? Pontius Pilate, who was born, legend has it, in Fortingall, Perthshire, the son of a Roman ambassador and a local lady who had a thing about men in togas.
If the locals of ancient Perthshire were minded to make up stuff, why didn't they make it up about someone dashing and heroic, rather than the Bible's pantomime villain? Evidence of just how wrong we got this whole Bible business was presented last week by Dr Gordon Strachan, who has lectured on Edinburgh University's "lifelong learning" courses. It's Strachan's thesis that Jesus himself may well have visited Britain - to be precise, Glastonbury - where he could have been hoping to catch performances from such biblically themed acts as Genesis or Peter, Paul and Mary. "He probably came here to meet the druids, to share his wisdom and gain theirs," said Strachan, launching a documentary on the subject. "It is also suggested he came to the west of England with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, who was here for tin." Just as Pilate, according to Perthshire legend, was fathered by a Roman who couldn't have arrived in the area until decades after Pilate's death?
There are some mysteries that will never be explained - will we ever, for instance, know the true spelling of Chappaquiddick or capture the Blurry Monster of Sasquatch? Why do clairvoyants have answering machines?
The unexplained manifests itself in the unlikeliest of places - Findhorn, last week, being among them. Normally this sedate town in Moray is better known as the locus of a mildly wacky commune for those of a spiritually curious bent. A more literal take on spiritual curiosity was achieved, however, when Ray Shepherd-Smith, barkeep of the Royal Findhorn Yacht Club, took an order from two older customers. On pouring their drinks, he turned around to discover the gentlemen had disappeared. The bar's CCTV had captured him deep in conversation with them, but they had not registered on the footage.
"You can see me talking to them but they are out of shot," he said. "It was surreal - they were there one minute and gone the next." Surreal indeed, though maybe less so on remembering that Findhorn is close to Aberdeen, where customers can easily dematerialise on discovering an establishment's prices.