But just to prove that nothing is sacred, we must report the following conversation in a Bendigo IGA supermarket this week.

First, we must give a special award to the Channel 7 Sunrise crew which reported – without a hint of a smirk – that the salmonella outbreak could be “just the tip of the iceberg”.

A bloke was standing next to an IGA female staffer who was busy replacing older lettuce packets with some new and most likely safer ones.

“On TV they said this could be just the tip of the iceberg,” he remarked to the packer. Luckily, she got it and chortled.

“Yep, someone’s gonna get a rocket,” she replied.

“Why’s that?”

“Cos!”

“Lettuce end this repartee straight away,” he said.

It seemed like a draw.

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Valentines Day tomorrow, chaps. Just saying.

The DTM household doesn’t usually get involved in this sort of thing, but someone thought it’d be a good idea if we did “something special”.

So, we are: we’re going on a classic car run with about 30 or 40 of our closest personal friends.

But wait, it gets better. There’ll be a sausage sizzle at the end.

We’ll let you know how it works out.

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For reasons now best forgotten, DTM was browsing through the Addy’s classifieds this week and wondered if a couple of the advertisers were having a lend, or had seen a joint business opportunity.

One ad announced : “Bendigo Men’s Massage”.

The one immediately below it was for “Blocked drains: same day service.”

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Here’s a thought for Scots’ Day Out in Bendigo.

Officially, 10.8 per cent of people in the City of Greater Bendigo have declared themselves to have Scottish ancestry.

The highest concentration is within the centre of Bendigo, which has 13.1 per cent of people with Scottish blood. In comparison, just 7.2 per cent of Melburnians have links to ancient Alba as it is referred to in the Gaelic tongue.

Bendigo’s well-known connections with Clan MacLeod were cemented in 1954 when the 28th chief of Clan MacLeod, Dame Flora MacLeod, came to Bendigo as part of a worldwide effort to embed the clan in new lands. She won a lot of hearts here when she declared it was okay to tell jokes against the Scots because every one of her countrymen knew they were absurd.