Many years ago I used to hang out in a wee Italian Café in Shettleston where I was born.
It’s a small place Shettleston; it’s the kinda place where if the full moon gets reflected in the local pond, people threw in dead cats to see if they will be resurrected in its magical waters. I am exaggerating, it’s not that mental. But the locals were ‘special’ in some ways.

This café I want to tell you about was a small affair and was owned by an Italian family called the Matteo’s.
There were two middle aged sisters, one called Anna and the other called Ella.
Anna wore a tall white pompadour curly wig which sat tall on her head like one of those profiterole towers often fashionable at cheap weddings.
Ella wore a tall dark one in much the same unusual style. Both were pencil thin and wore heavy black eye make up and big dark beauty spot stabbed on their top lip. Both in skin tight leopard skin clothing. She also owned a wee ginger lap dog called Tootsie.

I knew Ella more than Anna; as she ran the café with her side kick Terry the Poof and the wee dog.
In Glasgow you are usually named after your character, for instance there was also a man called ‘Bobby the Kiddie Fiddler’ because he was a paedophile.

Strangely no one called her -‘Ella the Black Wiggy woman’, but I suppose being gay ear-marked Terry out for his unique name.

Terry was also middle aged and lived in a caravan out at the back of the café where a collection of unseen dogs that barked often were tied to a fence post.

He had a face that sagged around the eyes as he had been beaten too often and the black eyes that had just faded eventually sat like deflated poached eggs on his weather beaten cheeks.
He drank too much booze as well, he would often drag a half bottle of whisky out of his back pocket and take a slug at it between serving up soggy chips and black edged crispy looking fried eggs.

He wore skin tight black jeans, a baggy bright shirt on his scrawny frame and always had a bright pink chiffon scarf tied around his neck in a big fancy bow.
It was the kind of fashion statement that made drunk and angry men hit him often, and I admired his tenacity and the sheer force of will that made him continue to wear it in the face of fear and aggression.

Shettleston was not ready for a man who wore a pink pussy-cat bow tied scarf and flaunted his love of music by camping around dancing and often stood with his hand on one hip.
On his head he wore a tight black beret at a jaunty angle.

He usually had a black eye that was in several shades of fading, the colours ranged from a deep scuddy purple to a pale yellowish green. It somehow suited him.

I was seventeen. I shared his love of music and the café had a great juke box, it was at the height of the ‘Grease’ and ‘Saturday Night Fever’ era and the songs of both top box office films would blare out of that old 10 pence a song silver coloured juke box.
Terry and I would dance. The dogs out back would bark and Ella would scream for more chips.

The café seating area was based around a corner shape with a few boxed-in Formica bench seats that you slid into with fixed Formica yellow tables with aluminium trim.

In the window there was a big ‘Terry’s All Gold Chocolate’ advertisement display made of cardboard that pulled out into a two dimensional image that looked like a big balcony overlooking some Mediterranean lake.
It was dreamy and exotic to me, the cardboard image was of a young beautiful couple dressed in elegant evening wear. They stood at the white stucco balcony and looked out at the still blue water and I often stared at it and wondered if I would ever find such a well dressed man in a dickie bow who would give me chocolates beside a moonlit lake.

Terry would watch me stare at it; he would scoot in beside me, cross his skinny legs and ask “Isn’t that scene gorgeous? I want to go there too, where do you think it is?”

I would shake my head and imagine myself in a big blue dress looking over the calm waters with a sexy man at my side. “How deep is your love” the Bee Gees played in the background and I was whisked away in my imagination again.

I would often joke with Terry and ask him if he was the chocolate man in the advert of the same name and he would laugh back at me “Yes, I am the chocolate man, I melt when you hold me tight” and then he would twirl around as he held aloft a plate of greasy chips, and then bend elegantly and kiss the cardboard man in the dickie bow and evening suit. I would giggle and clap my hands.

Ella would scream at the top of her voice and tell me to stop encouraging him.

The heart of the café lay with Ella’s wee dog Tootsie.

It was a tiny pom-pom orange dog, I don’t know the breed, but it was strange looking.
It had a reddish coat like a fluffy squirrel’s with a wee pointy blackish face and tiny wee skinny sleek ginger legs that peeked out of the fluffy body.
It yapped constantly and bit everyone it came within six inches of.
It was small enough to be the size of a handbag.
The wondrous and bizarre thing about the evil ginger fluff ball was…it often had a heart attack.

Now I don’t know if it was actually a heart attack, but it would yap furiously and then fall on its back, like the biggest drama queen alive, then it would gasp and Ella would scream.

She would physically throw the hot chips and runny eggs at the wall, run around hysterically, Terry would flap his hands and scream like a banshee as his scarf got entangled in his face and Ella would demand anyone that was present to press on the chest of the wee upturned dog till it came back to life.

That role often fell to me, I would jump up…as if I had been trained in dog CPR, and then grab the orange smelly beast, clear the Formica table with my hand like you see professional doctors do in preparation for an emergency operation.
The dog would be put on the table, I would press onto its wee tufty orange haired chest a few times and then it would leap onto its scrawny legs and bite me, every time.

Terry and Ella would be running into the street screaming around each other as passers by would gawp at them, realise the dog was having an ‘attack’ and carry on as normal.
Customers would sit and wait till the drama passed and Ella would not come back in till the dog was standing at the door yapping again, she would scoop it up and kiss its horrible wee mouth as Terry stroked it and whispered soft soothing words.

Then the café would get back to normal.

One time when I was being Janey the Dog Doctor, a young tall boy who worked in the bar across the road from the café came in and watched me perform on the beast and quietly said to me “That dog pretends to die every day, you do know that don’t you?”
“Yes, I know but it scares Ella”
I could feel him smiling at me as I kept my eyes down on the dog, which was now back on its feet.
Its attack was not as life threatening that day; I think the young guy’s honesty shamed the wee animal.

He laughed and said “Her and Terry are a couple of fucking drama queens, they love the attention”

I stared at him angrily, his deep brown eyes held my stare.

I snapped back “Some people need a wee drama to get through the day”.

He shrugged and walked away.

He left slamming the door behind him and it shook the fancy cardboard display that fell from its position and landed flat on the floor.
The Mediterranean was upside down and the happy couple landed in some cola that was spilt on the floor. I gasped at the sight of it – it was all collapsed and distorted looking.
Terry rushed to pick it up; he looked at me and wiped it down with a wee cloth and then he carefully put it back up at the window.

“All good Janey, nothing damaged” he spoke softly “The happy couple are fine”
Terry looked at me and patted the cardboard man on the head and came over to see how Tootsie was recovering.

“That boy fancies you” Terry said as the dog jumped back up and viscously bit my arm.
“I don’t like him, he is a dick” I snapped as I sucked at the bruise on my wrist.

Terry smiled and winked at me.

I wonder what happened to Terry, Ella and Tootsie; I hope they lived happily ever after.
And that tall boy who came into the cafe?
Well Terry was right, he did fancy me and we married three years after that meeting. To think we met over a dog that pretended to be dead in a café where a gay man with a bruised eye and jaunty cap worked with a woman in huge black wig.

My Niece Ann Margaret has a cat called Squeak. Apparently it’s her daughter Abi’s cat, but we are not sure. What I am sure of is, the cat has a personality disorder.
It goes to its litter tray, does a wee shit, and then instead of scratching the litter over the shit, it turns around and scratches at the wall.

It completely ignores the smelly wee shit and stands for at least three minutes making eye contact with me, challenging me to look away or comment and paws at the wall. I got fed up with this madness; I jumped down, grabbed its paw firmly and made scratching movements that covered the litter over the shit with its reluctant leg.

It struggled and meowed, then bit me. Then it turned around and hopped into the litter tray and determinedly squeezed out another wee shit, it stared at me again and scratched at the wall in defiance.

The wall is all scraped, the shit is uncovered and it merely sniffed at me, spat in my direction and padded out of the room.
Four year old Abi came through, she said to me “Stop making Squeak angry, he just bit me and that’s because you are here, he hates you, he doesn’t like touching his own poo….would you?”

She is right, I wouldn’t like touching my own poo, but I am not a cat- it is supposed to cover its own poo up.

I once had a cat called Twinkles who was the complete opposite; he would shit, then stand for about 40 minutes and completely scoop ALL the litter and the shit out of his box and spread it all over my hallway. We would lie in bed and in the middle of the night all you could hear was this “Sshh, sshhh, sshhh, sshh” noise for fucking hours as he stood there dementedly, doggedly scooping out the litter box.

You would think he was trying to dig to Australia the way he went about his business. I am sure he had OCD, if I screamed at him he would stop momentarily with a paw poised in mid air, then immediately went back to flicking the litter and shit all over my floor. He was like a cat possessed; my hall way resembled a scabby beach, all grit and small bits of shit over it. It took ages to clean it up and he sat watching me doing it every time.
Maybe he liked the sound of the Hoover? I am not sure.

Once he had managed to empty the tray, he looked at the mess all over the floor and then sat happily licking his own arse and wiping his face, congratulating himself on a job well done. This was EVERY shit and piss.

So I constructed a box with high sides and a roof.
I watched as he went in for his daily piss and scatter routine, it drove him crazy, the poor fucker was in there for ages and I could hear him scratch and flick those wee gritty stones up against the sides of that box for ages. Finally he came out covered in white flecks; like he had been to a cat wedding and was covered in confetti…he was totally confused.

Finally he would stand at the entrance and try to scoop all the litter out through his front legs into his hind quarters, but it never worked. He stalked around the box and you could see he was trying to work a way getting all the grit out of the box.
He never did manage it and finally gave up his cat OCD-ness and took to licking the lampshade in my bedroom and that eventually fell apart due to the sheer amount of cat saliva it had soaked up.

Then Twinkles moved on to having a deeply sexual relationship with the velvet armchair in my sitting room. It was embarrassing to watch.

He just seemed to pass one obsession up for another, and then he completely surprised me by going missing one night. He never left the house in his life and it scared me, but even more surprising was the night he gave birth to three kittens and made me realise he was a SHE.
I should have known I suppose.

Twinkles eventually got adopted out when my daughter Ashley was born, because the cat decided that Ashley’s crib and preferably her tummy was the perfect place to piss on nightly. I loved her, but had to stop her from trying to piss on the baby constantly.

I am sure she had fun wherever she went and miss her to this day, though my Hoover doesn’t. Her OCD behaviour broke three Hoovers in six years with the sheer amount of litter that passed through its pipes.

I never thought I would be old enough to buy a face cream for wrinkles…and today I did just that.
It sort of crept up on me without me knowing, did age.
It sneaked in during the night one dark winter and slipped into my left knee and sustained it creaky. One sunny day as I squinted at the sun, it sat slippery on my eyelids and left them saggy.
On an ordinary Wednesday it visited me quietly in between a cup of tea and cake and wrapped its evil self around my tummy and made it bloated. It walked up to me one day and pulled my face down wards and walked off without even a word of hello.
Age is disdainful friend; it never comes when you want it.

Where was it when I was desperate to get into a bar in 1978 when I was 17 years old?
Also I needed age to come by when a drug addict challenged me to fight when I owned a bar in 1984, I could have done with a few years on me as the junkie tried to throw a knife at my head, age could have helped along with its twin sister ‘wisdom’.
Had I been older I wouldn’t have jumped the bar and tried to get the knife off him.
I wouldn’t have a wee scar on my arm, if age and wisdom stopped by for a chat that day.
I don’t need age or wisdom now that I am old.

I am still 20 years old inside and age knows this - yet fights me everyday for the struggle over control of my skin and bones.
I really still expect the young guy who sits outside the local bar to check my ass out as I walk past. How dare age take this small pleasure away from me?
I loved wearing a short skirt and showing off my shapely legs in my 20’s now I know age mocks me and highlights the bumpy bits on my shin, that’s age making sure I know its there. It hates being ignored.

Now young men look at me and wonder if I have a hot daughter, they silently check their mobile phone and decide to call their mothers as I have reminded them that mum’s should never be forgotten.

“Do I look sexy to you?” I asked my husband.
“Always Janey” he smiled with crinkled eyes.

His short brown hair that is flecked with grey reminded me that he too had got bitten by age.
Where was the 16 year old skinny boy that used to stay awake and plan out our escape from the families that held us down? The small town life that made me ache to travel and see places I had read about in my school atlas. We were going to see the world.

We would sit up naked in that filthy single bed that was covered in nylon sheets.

Those hideous sheets made us sweat more than ever, and we would just devour each other till the sun finally peeked through the cheap thin curtains on the dirty windows of the East End flat we shared.
Grimy marks on the scummy windows made obscure reflections on the wall opposite from the light outside and we would lie there, stuck to each other and point out what the shapes meant to us.
I once saw an outline that resembled the face of Lee Marvin, husband thought it looked like President Kennedy, I told him he thought that because he was a Catholic.
We laughed for ages, he jumped up naked and rubbed the stain on the glass and it then looked like a cinnamon bun.
We swore we would never kiss or look at other human being till we died.

We had age at bay in those days, age never dared to show its jealous face back then, it was away making paper out of the skin of the elderly neighbours. It was too busy to bother with us.

I would look at my mother and her friends back then, women in their early 40’s, with bare mottled legs, wearing their husband cheap chequered socks on their feet that were stuffed into slippers as they stood hanging out a washing on the line.

The smell of hot fat that sizzled away at the cheap meat cuts in a frying pan wafting out of their small kitchenette windows made me feel sick, and I knew I would never be them.
I smirked at their lack of ambition, made snide remarks about their dull drab lives and swore I would be well dressed with shiny hair till I died. I will never be one of them.

Age caught me being nasty and got me right between the eyes, it watched me from afar and waited for me, it sniggered at my naivety and jumped me like a rapist in the night, it got me hard when I least expected it.
My dark hair started growing in white; my skin lost its bounce and my eyes grew dull.

Age roared upon me like a funeral sheet that is slowly dragged up a corpse, first the feet, then the knees, then the torso and finally it covered my face. It got me. It wrapped itself around me like a hug from a dirty man who has the audacity to touch you and just when you think he will let go, he holds fast.

I am old. I am 46 years old.

I won’t wear my husband’s socks, I will never fry cheap cuts, but I have the wrinkles and the marks of a woman who has lived long enough to know that age is never a friend- it’s neither an enemy. It’s just there to remind me I lived. I had a life.

I have realised that after 27 years of marriage I may have brainwashed my husband or at the very least wiped out his past memories. He told me that the inner voice that everyone has, you know the voice that reminds you to shut the door or zip up your fly, has been replaced from his voice to MINE!
I now occupy a space inside his head that tells him to ‘Go pee’ ‘Go make tea’ and ‘Don’t talk, she is busy’ that’s a result as far as I am concerned.
How exciting. I hope I don’t tell him to strangle me in my sleep.

Ashley is back to normal and her room looks like Hiroshima post bomb and I believe my entire coffee mug set lives in there with various states of penicillin type fungus growing slowly. I don’t actually want to think about it but I know I must go on a cup hunt and rescue them before they manage to develop a cure for some unknown strain of Asian flu or Foot and Mouth disease. I opened her door yesterday and I am sure I saw a clumpy sad Buffalo stomp around the knickers and bra’s that are strewn all over the floor, it must be eating the left over pizza that is dehydrating on the window ledge beside her DVD collection.

I have no idea what goes on in that room, it’s like Narnia in there.

“Don’t go in there” my husband warned me.

“Was that my voice in your head that told you to tell me that?” I asked him.

“Shut up Janey, stop being horrible” he snapped at me “She is entitled to her privacy” he added.

“Yes she is” I agreed “But she is not allowed to start a bio dome project or city zoo in my flat”

“There are no animals or bio hazards in there, you are being over imaginative” he explained as he led me away from her Door of Doom.

“When she gets a boyfriend she will clean it up” husband said.

“She doesn’t want a boyfriend and never has had a boyfriend and if she did have one he would get lost in there; do you think she hates men?” I spoke quietly.

“I can hear both of you” Ashley screamed “I will never get a boyfriend because of you mum, you scare men way and when they see you do comedy they think I am psycho because of the things you say about me on stage, now go away or I swear to God I will adopt a clutch of scabby disease ridden cats and give you all fleas”

I may to have to rethink my mothering skills, I hope I haven’t stopped her from getting a boyfriend; I was married at her age. She is a beautiful talented young woman and is fed up people assuming she is a lesbian because she hasn’t dated yet.

She did tell me she saw the most gorgeous man in the world in Amsterdam, she watched him walk away and now every man she ever meets will have to be up the mysterious man in Amsterdam’s standard. How hard will that be?
There is nothing worse than having fallen for a man who has never actually spoken to you. Is he gay? Is he a misogynist? Is he married?
She has so much to learn and I think the last person she needs to learn from is me!

Having spent weeks in Edinburgh at the Fringe I am slightly disorientated back in Glasgow.

I am home, unpacked and have my daughter Ashley back with me.
She was off to Amsterdam halfway though the fringe as she went on holiday with her mates. It’s the first time she has missed a Festival in ten years. I was bereft without her as she is a great support to me.

I woke up today and couldn’t quite work out where I was- it was scary.
The more successful I become the more I seem to leave home and the more I leave home the more I live out of a suitcase and I get freaked out waking up places I am not sure where I am!

I saw my daddy today and it was fabulous to be with him and talk about regular stuff and not how many stars did my show get and how many tickets we sold today. Though my daddy was pleased to hear the show was a sell out and hugged me in congratulations and then asked me to pick a shower from a magazine he had with him as he his getting a new shower fitted for me in my en suite bathroom…well he is my daddy!

Husband slept all day and is coming down with the cold, being on the streets of Edinburgh flyering for the show will probably have given him a virus and eventually will kill him. It will be my fault of course, but flyerer’s are easy to come by.

I miss Edinburgh already; it was amazing for me this year.

I must tell you about the great guest I had on my chat show, it was Kate Adie the world famous war reporter. She was awesome and so funny. To hear of her tales of being bombed in Beirut whilst buying shoes to sitting on the deck of a war ship and watching missiles being launched as she ran for cover… was amazing and she is an inspiration to everyone who meets her.

I want to be Kate Adie, but will never live up to the reality of the situation.

So here I am at home on the sofa writing stuff, I am currently working on a TV idea which will probably not come to fruition as that is the way of the world, but I am living and hoping it will.

I feel very old today, my legs hurt from walking up and down the cobbled ancient streets and I have eaten that much shit that I have spots. But I am happy and home and that’s all I can say today.