Talk of the Town: Feathered friends up before the beak?

FETTES Police Station became home to a brace of unlikely "jailbirds" recently . . . with a cooped-up couple happy to accept the regular meals and water provided at Her Majesty's expense.

The temporary inmates were not hardened criminals, but nesting ducks who had set up home outside the station. The feathered twosome were seen waddling into the foyer and feeding on scraps of bread nonchalantly tossed over by police staff. The ducks even avoided a bill.

A police source claimed they have been given the adopted names Vera and Jack Duck-worth.

Saints alive, SuBo's singing for a religious superstar

IT SEEMS a lifetime ago that Susan Boyle stepped out in front of Simon Cowell on Britain's Got Talent.

Since then, of course, she's become an international superstar who is expected to perform for the Pope when he visits Scotland this year.

And now the 49-year-old – who has called her Roman Catholic faith the "backbone of who I am" – has been asked by the Vatican to perform at a concert in Italy in a saint's honour. The chart-topper, from Blackburn, West Lothian, has been invited to perform at a concert for Padre Pio, a Capuchin monk said to have borne the wounds of Christ. He died in 1968, and was canonised eight years ago.

Keep your pecker up

SHOCK awakenings by the dreaded alarm clock could be a thing of the past thanks to blue sky thinking by a Lothian design student.

Natalie Duckett, 22, has devised a simple timepiece – with no face or hands – that stirs dozy snoozers from their slumber with the "natural hammering" of the lesser-spotted woodpecker. Sleepers set a dial and, at zero hour, a metal "beak" taps out a call on the nearest bedside object. The budding boffin now hopes to attract a mass market producer for her woodpecker clock.

Quite how the noise of a woodpecker hammering away is more relaxing than a traditional alarm clock is not fully explained, although a bigger question might be whether Natalie's bird clock would even be heard above the din of the perennial tram works.

Crowded bikes

BANDS used to touring the world probably see little of the places they go to. Cooped up in buses, hotels or dressing rooms, the time spent exploring the local area is limited.

But not for Crowded House, who played the Usher Hall on Friday night.

After the gig one band member revealed that he and frontman Neil Finn are dropped off by the coach ten miles outside every location, so they can then cycle the remaining journey, keeping fitness levels and seeing some of the world.