Have updated the blog every day this week! New Years Resolution intact. I was sent an email this week to tell me someone had found this on the web. It’s a TV pilot I did years ago in London. If every pilot I ever  did was laid end to end it might reach the moon. Most of them were complete piffle. This I think was the exception.

With all the comedy giants of the time, it was about to be commissioned when Angus D went to the BBC. SOB. So anyway, the report was pre-recorded but the studio stuff was live. I have never been more nervous in my life it was at London Weekend TV in front of a live audience.  Just before we went out onto the set Nick Hancock turned to me and said ‘I hope you’re not crap’. Now I would give as good as I got. Then I was floored. Swine. Never forgave him for that. Still onwards and upwards…I will tell you what happened after the recording on Monday  warts & all & yes a wild party was involved.

With Angus Deayton, Tony Hawks, Clive Anderson & Nick Hancock..

Edinburgh maybe a disaster zone in terms of snow but it looks so pretty!
These photos taken first thing this morning when shuffling round the streets with the dogs.
Warms the cockles of your heart.
Just as well really as every other part of me is iced up and shivering.

Off to start the Christmas shopping …..bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

America’s People Magazine say these geezers are some of the Sexiest Men Alive? Agree?

                                                                                                                                                                              1.Ryan Reynolds aka Mr Scarlett Johnssen. What do you think?

2.Don from Mad Men aka John Hamm

3. Kellan Lutz – sounds like a spoonerism but it’s the name of the supermodel from Twilight

4. Matthew Morrison star of Glee and a man who loves a good song.

5. John Bon Jovi! Did you say John BJ? Yup man with blow dried hair gets into the list.His sister must work for the magazine. Nothing wrong with him but he is about 100 compared to the rest – and I should know so am I

6.Joe Manganiello – a bonnie laddie and a werewolf  in True Blood – or True Bleed as they say in Aberdeen

7.Robert Downey Junior aka the wild man of Borneo. My fav story of him was he woke up in the bedroom of a complete stranger once. Just go up went downstairs said morning as the jaw of the owner hung open he departed. You gotta love a man like that.

8. Jesse Williams from Greys Anatomy – never mind Grey’s anatomy what about his? He used to teach English at a secondary school – sadly not the one I went to.

                                                                                                                                                  9. Justin Timberlake  allegedly recently playing away from home – not very sexybehaviour in my book.

10. Vin Diesel aka Diesel Van

11. Jake Gillygillyassenfeffer. Gilangal – och you know who I mean. Cute

What about Brad?

George?

Albert Tatlock?.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder let’s be frank. What about Frank?

The sexiest man alive might be your man. Might not. Either way you can earmark this page and pop in for a wee stare. Warms the cockles of your heart. Or thereabouts.

Not even in my wildest dreasm could I ever look this stylish posh clothes or not

Meeting up with pal Fiona for lunch today.  Once we recovered from the shock of getting a parking space we were wandering along George Street when we clocked what used to be The Pier, right next door to Jaegar and opposite Space NK ? Yup you got it. Well  in that  large empty unit we pied the  door open and it is full of clothes. Be still my beating heart it is an Austin Reed

this is more like the truth - though now with Austin Reed togs to hide it

Clearance Sale.

We were off and in there in a flash. Suits for £50! Mens suits, pure merino wool jumpers for £10,shirts, skirts, trousers, a lovely womans peajacket – pure wool for £20 it was till there when I left – size 12 but double brasted not for me. Anyway….they are getting stock in later today and tomorrow so getin there….they don’t know how long they are open for but it is packed with seroius bargains. Fi got a Thomas Pink shirt for a tenner! Viyella, Austin Reed and some labels cut out but quality I’m telling. Well I was so

The fabulous Louis Armstrong - trad jazz favourite

excited I rushed home to blog about it!

After spending £50 – I don’t have but for 5 items of top end clothes -there’s a couple of birthday and Xmas pressies in that lot – off we went to Wildfire on Rose Street the end part between Castle Street and Charlotte Square.

A great well restaurant to tuck yourself in for lunch especially on a day like today. And a great deal for at £10.95 for 2 courses.

I stuffed my chops with a smoked salmon rillete which came with toast though I had oatcakes as I blow up like a puff adder if I eat too much bread.

Fiona had chicken liver pate

Main courses Fi had Duck on a bed of slow cooked lentils – yum! I had a rump steak – a perfect size for lunch which came with lovely shoestring fries and a wee pot of salad no supplement for that which was a nice surprise.

Cosy wee place, tea lights, stone walls, a wood burning stove – which wasn’t on today but it is about12 degrees (tropical compared to yesterday!) trad jazz faintly tinkling in the background and, comfortable upholstered banquette and individual chairs. I’d go back. In fact I will – soon.

Yes insomnia does takes it's toll. Well I am almost 28

Wide awake club 4.26am what is that about? Am considering changing my name to Insomnial as it suits me better than Alison or Al but not quite as much as puffy faced old bat.

Have flipped on the telly only to find  STV Nightshift is on. Makes you feel better that. There’s obviously loads of folk up and about all  listening to the voice over Laura doing her chat over some old footage. It’s like a live radio show she does requests and banters – and she is very funny. So if you wake up and are wandering aimlessly round the house going a bit mad I can recommend it.

Damn that menas my brain will wake me up now just to hear her. C’est la mintal.

Actually my eyes were a lot worse than this

Yup it’s that Sunday morning feeling. Tongue stuck to the roof of the mouth, eyes like a lab rats, body shaken and stirred and not in a James Bond sort of way. Yuck.

The lovely BB

There is an unwritten rule when I get together with old pals for the first time in ages – we go berserk. So last night Marie & John were over from Luxembourg, Gordon & Rachel was down from Aberdeen, Ann Smith – starring in Sunshine in Leith with Billy Boyd, who is based in London appeared later as the production is in Edinburgh this week – it’s off to Aberdeen tomorrow go and see it if you are up in the area it is bloody brilliant!. Fiona Duff, PR guru and wild woman of Wonga with her husband the lovely Callum, and various others too but….the thing is this. Marie, Dynamite, Ann, Gordon,  Fiona and I all used to share a house in London in the 80′s and so seldom end up in the same place at the same time this was very much a case of light blue touch paper and retire.

Starting at 6pm in the house with a couple before meeting at The West Room at 7.30 for the official commencement of the binge drinking. We congregated amongst shouts of ‘ What are you having?’ ‘Hello what would you like?’ Fancy another’ and fitted about as much booze into 60 minutes as possible, leaving not a drop in any glass as we careered out of there towards Howies Cellar in Alva Street for 8.30.

My dear long suffering husband started Howies and sold the business about 3 years ago which I thought I would say before I say what I am about to say so you know there is not a whiff of nepotism or insider dealing going on but… we had a great meal. We did. Set price £15 a head the grub kept coming. Black pudding with tomato, calamaris, haggis spring rolls which in all honesty I wasn’t

Ann Smith singing in Howies rapt we were. Rapt.

mad about, mushrooms in a creamy sauce, chips, fish cakes, roast vegetables we really got our moneys worth and then the booze. Yup £15 a head for the food and £20 a head for the drink. There was tons of the stuff. As we laughed, and face stuffed then Ann Smith arrived hot from the stage of the Kings Theatre and sang Sunshine on Leith – as you can see from the photograph there wasn’t a dry seat – sorry eye – in the house.

OMG! Look at his thumb! WEIRD

At 12.30 we left, full of …well everything. The second we got home we put on the X factor …..and fell asleep. Can’t wait to see it…waiting for the others to wake up it’s 10.51am Sunday., I can’t put on the radio, read the papers or turn on the telly in case I see any chat about it. So am off to give them a cup of tea and tell them dressing gown son, downstairs NOW, Simon, Cheryl, Louis & nurofen await.

Have a great day!

Alison x

If he squats in a bush like this in Scotland someone will shoot him - me?

About to slide into a Sunday night slumber, reclining in the bath I had been dreaming of since getting up this morning I turned to AA Gills food review in the Style Section of The Sunday Times.

The House of Bruar on the A9 was his destination and it seems he liked what he ate.I have no issue with that. What I do have issue with is the ignorant and blatant assassination of the Scots as a nation in terms of what we eat and how we eat it. This man left Scotland a long long time ago and that is where his reality lies. In the past.

I haven’t heard so many generalisations since I read the reviews for AA Gills first  book  ’Sap Rising’ – in a nutshell ’a load of shite’.

Insisting in swapping any real facts of the food us Scots buy, prepare and eat these days he makes the old cliched pops at the food.

No. 1 in the hit parade the last time AA Gill spent any time here.

‘Why Caledonian catering is not merely as bad as it is, but as bad as it can willfully manage, is a mystery. But still Scots eat more pitifully, poorly and suicidally than anybody else in the world who has a choice.’

AA Gill claims to be a Scot which presumably is why he speaks his own culinary Gaelic. Namely a language that died long ago, an extinct, if not endangered vocabulary of pies, and pasties, deep fried Mars Bars and fried eggs, and ‘those shrunken menopausal pies with their withered gum of pale pasty and the nameless, scatological gore of their dank fillings’. When was the last time he wrapped his Harley Street straightened and whitened teeth and overpink gums into a Scotch Pie? 1978? It is harder to find a pie packed with rubbery nodules these days than one that is moist, meaty, unctious whether it’s made of beef, lamb or venison. But that wouldn’t make such pithy copy.

AA Gill is a brilliant wordsmith but to dip into our culture and country so seldom and yet feel he is qualified to spew forth with any authority whatsoever is typical of his ego, the size of Peru.

John Cleese demonstrating Upper Class Twit of The Year not that I'm saying anything.

So he deigned to pop into House Of Bruar no doubt on his way to some roaring open fired mansion in the country to congregate with Tweed wearing, marble mouthed, Southern dwellers catered by a professional chef to kill animals and cock a snook at the locals and Scotland in general. Out of your Ivory Tower Gill, away from your rarified life and into the real world I challenge you to lay down your prejudice and see Scotland the way it is not the way you remember it.

Whatever abuse Mr Gills gut suffered as a child has prevented him from opening his hooded eyes to the fact that Scotland, the Scotland of his nightmares and distant past is long dead, along with our record of having the highest rate of heart disease in the world.

Give me 48 hours I’ll change your mind.

This about sums it up

It was always going to be a big night. A friends from the south of Englands 50^th birthday dinner in Majorca. Coincidentally David and I are over for a weeks sunshine so we are included in the numbers for dinner. There were 10 of us. They had been at it since Friday so we mistakenly believed this might mean it was not quite such a carry on. Aye right.

We pitched up at 7.30 sharp for a few drinks. As we stood swigging a glass of cava suddenly one of their party arrived pushing is wife in a wheelchair. It seems she broke her toe the day before during a rather alcoholic boat trip. So one casualty before we started.

And how we started. One your marks, get set, go!

During the first ten minutes talking to a guy called Gerry who I have never met before he said Where do you live? Edinburgh I said .Oh do you know a girl called ***** *****? yes I said she is one of my best pals. Holy shit he said she dyed my pubes blonde in the 80′s for a joke. So we got her on the phone instantly.

That about set the tone for the night.

After an hour and a half drinking we sloped off into the dining room for dinner. A long dining room was laid out and the waiter marched us all along to the very end, where they had segregated a table for 10 behind a huge bush. It seems this was their third night in the dining room and the other guests clearly wanted them as far away from them as possible. Guffaw.

Wine, delicious food, wine, white and red. Cut to the end of dinner. No-one else in the dining room all of us in high spirits. We moved to the bar downstairs, we needed another drink like a hole in the head, of course. As we entered the bar I spotted a piano player so marched up and asked him if he would play Happy Birthday. Oh course he said then I have to go.

Don’t go don’t go! I shouted do you play boogie woogie?

I am a Hungarian Concert Pianist he declared.

Yes but do you play boogie woogie?

Yes I do said the confused looking Hungarian

OK I said jamming my fat bum down on the piano stool beside him you play the bottom part and I’ll play the top and off we went. And we did.

Much squealing and carrying on and then slumping in a selection of couches outside and it seemed like the perfect time to have a large gin.

A large gin in this part of the world is about a quarter bottle so off we went. On your marks, get set, go!

We then took it in turns to have a shot in the wheelchair whilst roaring with laughter at some very bad jokes.

At one point a Russian man turned up and told us to be quiet.

Apparently I stood up at this point and said with a very bad South American accent that I had come all the way from Paraguay to celebrate my friend Ed’s birthday and I wasn’t going to bed until I was good and ready before pointing at everyone else in the company and making up a fictitious location from when they had all come. Poor guy apologised to us and went back to bed, to lie awake and hate us from a distance.

My new role models

He wasn’t the only one to hate us, I hated myself this morning, waking up with my mouth like the bottom of a budgies cage, a face like a well slapped arse and an imprint of my book on my cheek which 12 hours later is still there. Class bird me.

I can’t tell you how fantastic it was to wake up this morning and find the sky here was cloudy. Now that’s a sign. If I can bare to look at the photos of last night I will post one or two tomorrow.

As the Pope and his entourage make their way over to visit us here in Scotlands Capital city and the preparations get to fever pitch I wonder if I’m the only one in the world who can state honestly The Pope knocked me out. He did.

In 198? I was a student a Napier and lived in a flat in Barclay Place up Tollcross way on the third floor. The back window looked out onto the meadows and I lived intermittently between Chaplins (no longer) and The Golf Tavern drinking snakebites, well ’til my grant ran out anyway.

I shared a flat with 3 guys and one of them spent his days and nights sitting stuffing great bowls of cereal into his face in front of the telly as I tended to my axolotl aka a black Mexican marsh newt called Toby who only had 3 legs due to losing one in a fire before I adopted him, anyway I digress. On this particular day I was chasing George, the cereal eater through the flat with a shoe as he had confessed to feeding my goldfish to Toby, the axolotl. Murderer! I shrieked at him. Naturally he could move faster than me (the axolotl could move faster than me) so he escaped quickly to the far end of the kitchen. As I lunged at him he grabbed the shoe from my outstretched hand and flung it out of the 3^rd floor window onto the meadows 40 feet below. Bloody furious I poked my head out but couldn’t see it anywhere then as I craned my neck one way, then George screamed.’Holy shit ! it’s the pope ‘

Yeh right I snapped pulling my head back up at speed and knocking myself out on the window in the process apparently the window wasn’t open as wide as I thought it was.

Anyway I came round in time to see all 3 boys with their heads out the window as I scrabbled up onto my feet in time to see The Pontiff being ushered off to visit The Head of The Church of Scotland who apparently lived just across the Meadows. So there we are. The Pope knocked me out. Told you.
Moral of the story. Don’t share flats with boys. Or Mexican Marsh newts.

Potential opponent for Dave on court

Living with Andy Murray. Well someone who thinks he is. Have you heard of this system whereby if you enter a competition and call your opponent, suggest 3 different days and times to play and if they can’t make any of those times you win by default without playing? I hadn’t but I have now. David is in the semi-final of the Club Handicap Championship and has yet to play a match at all.
Each time through the rounds he has come off the phone guffawing loudly as yet again his opponent can’t make the times suggested.
So anyway yesterday he strode off to play his semi-final match against a really nice geezer and won 7-5 6-0 so he is on for the final. Tomorrow.

Dave afterwards

Teenwolf and I are smirking broadly as the entire tennis club congregate to watch the final – the non-handicap one is just after Dave’s moment in the sun – so the whole lot of them will be sitting at the side of the court. The best thing of all is he may well be playing a very talented 11 year old who is in the other semi. This I will not just have to see but take photos, video and post on youtube for all the world to see. I know I’m a cruel old slapper but I just can’t help it.
I will report. If I can stop laughing long enough to up-date the blog.