Singing is something I am not very good at it, I cant really sing very well but am giving it my best shot for BBC Children in Need slot. I bought a lovely wee kilt and smart jumper to wear. Craig Hill is my beautiful singing partner and BOY can he sing he is just bloody amazing!
So Craig and I rehearsed and it seems to be good, we are singing the Proclaimers song ‘Sunshine on Leith’ and if we get through to the second round we are singing ‘Letter from America’.

So after the singing session I popped over to see baby Abi, her new baby sister Julia and their mother (my niece Ann Margaret). Abi is now aged three and the funniest wee creature in the world. I was amazed how big wee baby Julia had grown; she is no longer a wee ‘prawn’ newborn…she is so cute and her eyes are huge!
Ann Margaret went off to the shops and left me in charge.

I was cradling the baby and Abi said “Aunty Janey, can I face-paint myself?”
I agreed and carried on snuggling the wee new baby, then minutes later Abi came running into the room completely blacked up! Her entire face, ears, neck and hair were a deep shiny black!
All you could see were the whites of her dark eyes!

It was scary and funny to see a toddler do an ‘Al Jolson’ (Old US singer who blacked up and sang…very politically incorrect nowadays). I pissed myself laughing and decided to teach her the old Al Jolson song ‘Mammeee’ complete with blackened jazz hands.
When Ann Margaret came back from the shops Abi came running into the hall singing ‘Mammeee’ waving her wee fat black chubby hands, Ann Margaret screamed and dropped the shopping and shouted “Aunty Janey, what the hell have you done, she is doing a Black and White Minstrel show!”
I did explain that Abi did the make up, I only did the choreography!

So today I got Ashley up at 4pm, she had been DJ-ing last night and was out very late and went off to do my workshops. I am looking after a bunch of 12-16 year olds teaching them comedy as a form of reinforcing self confidence. Yesterday they were treated to an exclusive Q&A with an amazing BAFTA award winning Scottish Comedy Actor who will remain un-named, he is an old mate of mine and came along at my request… the kids were hysterical with excitement that he came to chat to them. I will forever be in his debt for coming along at such short notice and being very humble. I have good friends!

I am off to sing my songs….talk soon.

London’s Kings Road is the ‘Golden Strip’ it’s where the beautiful people hang out. Young, tall, lean-limbed rich kids, products of gorgeous moneyed parents, friends of Will’s and Kate (the prince and the principle girl) promenade daily.

Sparkling white teeth with too much calcium, toned legs that have been skiing since tumble tots and handbags slung over shoulders that could pay the health care costs of a Malawian family for life. Strutting their stuff past the designer shops, a fashion show for free, they smell of Chelsea, they reek of Oxford and they will live in luxury, and I was jealous.

This was until I sat beside a group of three girls and two boys. A clutch of Cosmo’s, Clara’s and Monte’s, all terribly stressed and bemoaning mummy’s latest demand to ‘go work for a few months and get experience’.
‘Good old mummy’ I thought to myself.
“I can always offer to take our housekeepers dog out three times a week, or do a ‘Diana’ and work part time in a kindergarten” the gangly blonde girl swept her sheer curtain of shiny hair out of her face and nibbled on a pastry.

I have a tall, beautiful daughter, who I encouraged to work during University studies. She has been working since she was 9 years old, either in comedy performance or her own PR Company she set up at 15 years old to promote theatre and comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe. Between writing comedy sketches she is a DJ at weekends and loves her independence. Working is important to younger people, it really does give them sense of self worth and earning your own buck does wonders to their self esteem.

One girl sat there emptying her expensive handbag, Gucci purse, flashy mobile phone, Crème de la Mer face cream came spilling all over the glass table, searching for the keys of her car “I have mummy’s Jaguar today, lets all go to the Met bar for drinks, I have an account there” she bleated.
I watched them all troop out and wondered what it must feel like to be that rich, that beautiful and that young.

I was meeting a friend of mine who works in television, she is 45 years old (same as me) but she REALLY looks after herself. She looks after her skin and is constantly transfixed about her appearance.
She has already had a face lift (fuck knows how I must look; I only started wearing moisturiser five years ago). She has had botox in her forehead and recently got a new innovative laser treatment on her décolletage, she looks…..amazing and scary at the same time.
She has starved herself to make sure she is the same weight she was when she was eighteen years old and NEVER eats anything over 150 calories in one sitting, (she told me this as I stuffed a chocolate croissant into my face, 500 calories a pop).

“Janey, this is London, men don’t like fat old women, so don’t tell me I am paranoid” she muttered as I told her to eat more. She then sipped on Mint tea and ate a plain salad with no dressing.

“The older we get the harder we need to try to keep looking well, if we lose our looks the husbands look elsewhere” she added.

I looked at her emaciated frame, her thin brown skin, and her sallow eyes and shoved yet another cake into my face. I could feel my knickers nip into my waistline, my boobs were heaving beneath my black top and I wondered if I could have another cake without making her frightened.

“Listen Marla, I have been married 26 years, I have a man who knows I like to eat trifle at midnight, he wakes me up for sex at 6am and has at least twice this week had his fingers trapped in my mental hair, he clips my horned toe nails, he knows what soap powder will get menstrual blood out of my favourite knickers and once put a pony tail in my hair as I slept, if he fucks another woman its got nothing to do with how I look and everything to do with how he feels about himself or David Beckham would never have fucked that fat bird, because no one looks more perfect than Victoria Beckham”

Marla looked horrified. She sat quietly and stared at her perfectly manicured nails, then looked up at me with watery blue eyes and said “That is not helping Janey; I haven’t had a chocolate croissant since 1983”

“I am sorry Marla that was stupid of me to say that and I know I should lose weight and maybe use more conditioner and get my split ends cut, but I don’t think they are guarantees to keep a man faithful?” I added.

She smiled, leaned over and with one slim brown hand and swiped my chocolate croissant then took a huge bite.
Chocolate sauce spurted and smeared over her red lips, she licked it and smiled at me “This is better than sex” she laughed throatily.
“Not really Marla, if that’s the kind of sex you are starving to save, then fuck that girl- go shag the camera man”

We stayed a while longer and I know that I need to look better in myself.

Helena Rubenstein the famous cosmetic doyenne once said ‘There is no such thing as an ugly woman, just a lazy one”

The times in my life when I starved myself, ran four miles a day and spent hours in high heels were the saddest times in my existence, because none of it was really for me.

I eat cake and am loved; I will change when that changes.

Am so sorry my blog has suffered by being so bloody fucked up busy. I lie in bed and imagine I am writing my blog, I have all these great thongs to tell you, then wake up, ignore my laptop and jump on the tube to the next gig.

In my defence, I have written two articles for newspapers back in Scotland and have been gigging like a nutter, no excuses for ignoring my blog….I KNOW!

So here is a rundown. I had a wonderful time performing my play in Oxford on Tuesday last week. John Fleming (my Manager) and I caught the bus up to Oxford early and we wandered the beautiful tree lined buildings and streets.
I cannot begin to tell you how amazing that city looks in the weak summer sun. We went to Christchurch University and strolled around the grounds. The place is so startlingly awesome. Imagine being a student there? It made me wish I had was 18 again and instead of getting married in Glasgow’s East End I was studying in that ancient and gorgeous city. It wasn’t something that was considered when I was a teenager, going to Oxford? No…. going to prison…YES…getting pregnant…YES…getting a flat in Oxford to study law…NO!
I stood on those cobbled streets and watched all these wonderful young people, ride bikes, chat in groups and lunch beneath 14th Century Monuments and secretly wished I had had those opportunities….but then again maybe I would not be me now if I had been them then….does that make sense?

I suppose knowing that those educated and privileged people had taken time out of their night and paid to see ME perform a play that I had wrote did give me a sense of wonderment that I secretly enjoyed! I am not an uneducated failure after all!

The wonderful and talented actor Beth brought her boyfriend to come along and watch and that made it lovely for me, you have no idea how it feels to have a professional actor watch your stuff….so nice, I love her for supporting me like that.

I took some nice pics of Oxford and will post them soon.
John and I caught the late night bus back to London and husband was awake and had tea on the table for us arriving at 1am. What a guy!

Oxford has become my regular haunt, as on Friday I was back there to compere the Jongleurs club in the city. I caught the 5pm train from Paddington on my own, IPod at the ready; coffee in hand and instead of having a leisurely journey to my fav town….I was beaten near to death by the scrambling rampage of fat suited businessmen trying to get home for the weekend to their stone cottages and country piles in Oxford.

I have never seen so many badly behaved professional men in my life…..politicians and bankers by day, fucking fat rugby tackling passenger kickers at the weekend…I shoved my way onto the train but lo and behold it looked like a scene from those awful trains of death that shunted prisoners from camp to camp in the Second World War! I was imagining me sitting there listening to music and leisurely sipping tea reading a newspaper….OH NO! I was crushed with my face into the back of a fat man wearing a damp duffel coat outside a toilet in the corridor of the train….if they transported lambs like this, the public would have an outcry and vegetarian militant lesbians wearing oatmeal cardigans reciting placenta poetry would throw themselves on the track in protest. Why do we suffer this horror?
So I got myself into the first class carriage.

It was like a Gordon Brown convention, loads of smart dressed overly coifed men in cashmere coats and bright pink ties….the kind of men you suspect are living with their boyfriends in Dolphin Square and work in Westminster and go home to their bored wives in Oxford at the weekend. Ok I know that’s a generalisation but when they saw this scuzzy frazzled Glaswegian sit near them, they visibly grimaced. How dare scum enter their streamline clean first class carriage?

I ignored them; they peeked over pink Financial Times broadsheets at my damp face and frizzy hair. The ticket man came waddling down (do they ever do anything other than waddle?)
“Your ticket is not first class miss, you are not allowed in here without a first class ticket” he shouted as he looked at my crumpled rail ticket.

The men in pink ties smirked as a group, grey haired with shiny faces, all enjoying the one moment in their week…..the poor person had been caught, oh how they knew I never held a first class ticket….they sat in combined silence and nodded the nod to each other that rich people do when a common person has stepped into their oak smoked- cashmere-leather briefcase world without permission!

I looked at the ticket man and said “Look mate, there are NO seats on this train and I am not paying £18 to stand in a fat man’s armpit outside a toilet in a corridor for an hour, so I am taking this seat, I refuse to be dangerously rattled about on this shaky shit train, so deal with it”

“I can call the police and have you charged” he snapped with bristling authority.

The newspapers moved, eyes peeked out, Blackberry’s were ignored, laptops were clicked shut for better viewing purposes, creaseless shirts on well fed bodies leaned nearer, no one spoke….silence in the First Class carriage.

“Look, I really don’t give a flying fuck if you call the Queen, call the FBI, call your mother, I am not moving, I refuse to be treated like a refugee begging for air on your shit train, so jail me…I am stand up comic and its all material as far as I am concerned, I cant imagine all these nice politicians and bankers are going to appreciate you stopping the train and getting the police on for a woman who wanted a seat, do you?”

The ticket man smiled and moved on. I won.

Just as I settled into my warm comfortable seat, the crispy white shirted man leaned across and spoke loudly “You know madam; you have to pay the correct fare”
I looked him straight in the eye, I was aware his compatriots were staring and I said “No mate YOU have to pay the full fare, I don’t, I argue with people and stand my ground and you have probably paid enough for both of us, so thank you, now please don’t interrupt me anymore, I want to listen to some hard core rap on my IPod”

I don’t know what the collective noun is for a bunch of fat rich business men but I think it’s ‘wankers’.

London is great, the gigs have been awesome -husband has been good, annoying but good….we go home tomorrow and I am looking forward to seeing Ashley. Talk soon.

Yesterday was just as mental as possible. I left my Chelsea apartment at 3pm and headed up to Borehamwood to meet with John my manager who would be driving me to Birmingham for my gig there at 9pm.
As soon as I got off the train at Kings Cross I saw the message posted on the wall explaining that the train I wanted had been cancelled and I had to go through Kentish Town instead. So I dragged my tired arse up to Kentish Town, came out of the station and was crushed by around 8 million drunk pissed antipodeans who were mostly all wearing a sweater that said “Church”.
That confused as me as what Sunday Church serves that amount of alcohol? A turn out Church was a club! Silly old me.
I managed to get to the right platform to get the train up to Borehamwood and came upon a very young boy, spectacles hanging off his faces, wearing a Railway uniform, cheap tie askew shouting through a megaphone some mumbled words as hundreds of people jostled and shoved him around trying to find out where the replacement train was.

A big baldy headed man dragging a giant awkward Alsatian on a thick chain ran towards the young befuddled train boy. The dogs nails were skidding and its legs scattering all over the concrete walkway, its tongue hanging out and breathing madly – it managed to mount the young man’s leg as he tried to cope with multitude of frustrated commuters. The place was chaos.

I gave up and called John to come collect me from Kentish town and drive straight to Birmingham from there. We hit the road at 5pm and even before we got to Milton Keynes the traffic had slowed to a complete standstill. The dark skies were full of magnificent fireworks bursting over the beautiful red slashed sunset that fell over London. Still the cars never moved.
I started to panic, time was ticking, and we were doing 3 miles an hour for over two hours. I was due on stage at 9pm and it was now 8.50pm. We could not work out why the traffic was so slow then we came upon four huge lorries lying on their side, windows smashed, glass everywhere mixed with blood on the dented windscreen and suddenly my anxiousness to get to the gig was replaced with utter horror at the gnarled machines that had crashed on that road ahead of us. It really did put my petty stress at being late into perspective!

The gig was really cool, a lovely gay gig at the Nightingale bar. The audience were such good people and had waited patiently for me to arrive. I appreciate that.
After the gig I was off to be a guest at Kerrang! Radio, live in the studio, Tim Shaw is an amazing shock jock, yet he handled the interview about my past life and my comedy with amazing sensitivity and asked me outright questions no other live radio presenter had dared…..and whilst we were discussing child abuse, my mothers murder..Etc….the two glamour girls in the studio stripped naked! It was so very funny.
I was sitting with naked girls and having the best laugh ever.
Then Tim and I decided to tell the audience that I was going to go topless…I called husband live and asked him what he thought of my tit shot on radio and he just hung up laughing (he was annoyed that I even needed his opinion on this! If I wanna strip for another man then that’s my prerogative!)
Anyway Tim set it up for the listeners and I pretended to get my baps out…of course I didn’t it was a joke….but my brother was listening in back in Scotland and called me this morning horrified that I had got my boobs out on radio!

My daughter Ashley is mortified yet again, she loves Kerrang! And can’t believe I spoke about my breasts and even suggested getting them out with her fav DJ.

I am never going to grow old gracefully am I?

My London trip is going amazingly well. Other than walking miles with husband who just ‘loves walking’ …I do enjoy the strolls through Hyde Park but we almost got into a fist fight with a cyclist. Husband knows how scared I get on busy roads and held my hand walking across High Street Kensington pedestrian crossing. The green man flashed for us to cross and the red light kept the traffic at bay, yet a cyclist ignored the light and peddled straight through and almost knocked me on my ass. He then slowed down and mounted the pavement and got off his bike, and started to walk off.
“What are you doing?” shouted husband.

The man in tight bright Lycra cycling outfit turned round and shouted to my husband “Do you have something you want to say?”

Husband rushed towards him, me in tow.

I spoke first “Look mate the red light was on and you….” I started to say

The guy looked at me with disdain and butted in “I was dismounting”

Husband let go of my hand and threw himself at the man shouting “You fucking lying arse, the lights were red, you went through them, you almost hit my wife and now you fucking stand there trying to justify it by saying you were getting off your bike, I will fucking wrap your shite bike right around your skinny bright green legs”

The man jumped back on his bike quicker than you could say angry Scottish person and sped off almost knocking people like skittles on the pavement and shot off into the distance.

So that drama over I had a great sleep last night and arrived at BBC Radio studios this morning to take part in ‘Loose ends’ on BBC radio 4. The amazing actress Rachel Stirling was a guest and also the most wonderful director Sir Alan Parker, he of Evita and Midnight Express fame, oh and Fame the movie! He was so nice to meet and chat to, I was overwhelmed but he put me at ease! How good is my job getting to meet such interesting people?
The other astounding guest was Derren Brown; he is UK’s foremost mind bending, stunt magician.
During the radio show I shoved a note over to him that read ‘ give me the lottery numbers now’ and there was a wee drawing that I had done of me sticking an axe into his head in a mock threat….and HE sent back the note with six numbers on them! So we will see!

We went to the pub afterwards and Sir Alan Parker sat there for a while having a good old chinwag, I adore his work and feel privileged to get to know him a wee but more.
He told me that my comedy stint was wonderful and remarked that comedy in such a small room to such a small amount of people must be the hardest job in the world and I made it look easy! How nice!

I was out last night at Groucho with best mate Monica. We sat and ate chips and talked shit for ages (that’s what we do) and finally caught up with each others gossip. She is so busy nowadays and it was really great to just sit down and be together without phones or work or staff or managers or comedy people getting in the way!

I did bring along Easy Living Magazine as this months issue (December) has a great article inside about me! (It’s always about me me me) the photo shoot was lovely and I do look nice in it, except I seem to have loads of make up on! I will upload the pic as soon as I can.
Must go - Aspergers man is asking me what kind of Apple pie do I want? Apple Sponge-Apple Crumble-Apple Puff? Cold Custard or Cream?
It’s making me crazy….I just want pudding!