Tom's top tales week of 5 July

Some glorious stuff this week - a million thanks to the folk whose creative brilliance makes the programme what it is!

My train trip up from London (13-amp sockets in the carriage marked 'laptops and mobile phones only') provoked my mulling over their deployment for, say, cooking a meal with a portable microwave. Brendan in Muckhart then told me that

'on the early morning commuter train from limerick to Dublin, I saw four regulars cook breakfast with a toaster on the train plugs. One owned the toaster, one the butter, bread etc.' Fantastic.

Then there were the stories about expenses claims, notably James's 'friend in IT': 'A mate of mine worked for an IT company, each worker had a company credit card for hotels,meals etc. One day when 3 or 4 of the guys were at lunch a call came through saying the company went bust. My mate asked the waiter who at the end of the day was responsible for the card, he was told the company. Then followed the biggest party with the champers flowing so much the hotel had to get more in. The cost was all put on the credit cards.' This kind of thing could never happen nowadays, of course...

Stephen on team building events reminisced about one our own Brian Taylor was involved in, but pride of place has to go to this extraordinary story about a birthday treat that went somewhat awry. It's from Peter in Eaglesham:

'My wife Edith bought me a trip in a hot air balloon for one of my birthdays.

We went up in a beautiful evening , blue sky, no clouds, perfect visibility and warm.

There we were floating along enjoying the banter and identifying interesting and well known landmarks when suddenly the silence was shattered by a huge roar shortly followed by another and out of nowhere two jet fighters appeared and circled us menacingly (well they wouldn't mince, would they?)

The balloon pilot was obviously worried so he got on his walkie talkie or flighie talkie, and we soon learned that we were flying on the evening of the first anniversary of 9/11.

As you might remember the Americans in particular but also their allies were very nervous about some sort of repeat attack from the air so all flights had to have special clearance - from what I gathered we didn't - presumably because the operators didn't think a balloon would have come into the potential attacker category.

The words "shot down" and "radio our position" etc were mentioned several times as the jets continued to buzz around. Eventually with the pilot of the balloon clearly very nervous we were all getting our brown trousers on.

He at last confirmed to us what the problem was and said we had been advised to cut the flight short and get down ASAP if not sooner.

So to cut a long story short we immediately ditched in the middle of nowhere just missing a rather well made drystain dyke on the way down.

Eventually we were rescued and lived to tell the tale.

To this day Edith swears she didn't know it was the anniversary of 9/11 and about the shoot from the sky any unauthorised flights - but I am not so sure. My wife does have a sense of humour, she bought me a Biggles flyers helmet and a white silk scarf for my following birthday.

Still not convinced though about what she did and didn't know about that night.'