The gigs have been great fun, I really enjoyed the radio show on BBC Radio 4 Loose Ends, Ned is a great entertainer and it’s awesome to learn from someone so experienced. I have still not got the adverts finalised for the fringe brochure as I am still waiting on a time confirmation from one venue, hopefully they will tell me tomorrow as the deadline is Friday!
Last night I did a storytelling gig with Noel Faulkner, he owns the Comedy Café over in London’s East End. Noel is a great raconteur and fabulous storyteller, check out his show on May 8th and 9th at Comedy Café.
I went along to One Word radio studio’s to record a show that goes out this Saturday; I was talking about my five fav books.
1- The Shipping News
2-Candide
3-The Family at One End Street
4- Behind the Scenes at the Museum
5-Madame Bovary

So today I woke up and have a womb like a cluster bomb. It has imploded and I feel as though two rabid Alsatian dogs were ripping apart my fallopian tubes as a small angry clown banged on my ovaries with a claw hammer.
I love being a woman.
I am off to Bristol on Thursday, so I have two more nights here in lovely Westminster.

I am going to miss my beautiful daughters 20th Birthday tomorrow, I am in London and she is in Glasgow. This will be the first birthday I have ever missed and it hurts.
Can you believe she is 20? I cant it felt like only yesterday she was two and was playing with a wee plastic horse. Where did it all go? I was married at her age and running a bar in Glasgow’s East End, she has her whole life to go places and have fun.
I won’t die on her like my mammy died on me, I will be there to see it all and will always be on hand to help.
I am lucky; you should see what I made 20 years ago! She’s tall, intelligent, talented and very pretty and won’t get married by mistake, won’t give up her dreams to run a bar, won’t accept second best in life and will always be my wee baby.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ASHLEY

It was 27 years ago today that my husband aged 16 years old, proposed to me and we got engaged. That was 1979, it was a beautiful sunny spring day, we sat round the back of his dad’s pub in Shettleston near where I lived and he pulled out a small brown box from his trouser pocket. I jumped off the silver beer barrels where I had been sitting and opened it up to look at my very first diamond.
It was a simple diamond solitaire ring set in 18 carat gold. I was so chuffed and happy I thought I would burst with happiness. I kissed him, slipped it on my wee grubby finger and ran all the way home to show my mum.
I met her standing at the bottom of our street, she was waiting on Peter (the boyfriend she had who eventually killed her in 1982).
“Look mum what my boyfriend gave me, we are engaged” I blurted out as I put my finger up to her face.
“That’s a lovely ring Janey, I wish you health to wear it” She smiled. Her face looked distant I remember and could see she was distracted and worried about something.
“You ok Ma?” I asked her.
She smiled and told me she was fine, just need some money for fags and Peter was coming along soon and I could show him my new ring as well she added.
“No, I don’t want to Ma, I really don’t like him” I said.
“Janey, don’t start this again, he is really ok and you cause trouble when you argue with him, if you cant keep your mouth shut go away and I will see you later then” She snapped.
I walked away, felt the ring on my finger inside my jeans pocket and wandered up to my house. I sat in the dirty old room I lived in, wondered if my life would always be like this, waiting for something to happen or would I end up like my mammy, aged 45 and dating a violent man who gets you fags.
I couldn’t have ever imagined my life where it is now, I could never have sat in the filthy house in Shettleston back in 1979 and foresaw that I would be 45 years old and sitting in Westminster in a smart apartment that overlooked Big Ben and was working as a stand up comic and writer.
All those years ago when husband and I were teenagers, that night in 1979 when we lay in is big bedroom in his dad’s house, we both wondered if we would last forever.
“Will you always love me like this? Will this feeling always be here?” he asked me.
“Yes, I will, I cant imagine not loving you nor ever wanting to be somewhere you weren’t, lets never fight and lets never ever spend a night apart!” I naively but happily suggested.
Twenty seven years on, we have spent many nights apart, we have spent many days wanting to be where the other wasn’t we have screamed our hate and vile threats into each others face….but this morning he rang me sleepily and before I could speak he said “Will you always love me like this? Will this feeling always be here?” I could not believe he remembered, but he did and he sounded like the sixteen year old boy whose skinny arms and long legs used to wrap round me and hold me till my limbs got pins and needles.
I miss him today and I miss my mammy, she never got to see my daughter who will turn twenty in two days time.

Well the flight was fine, I am in London and all is well. Am staying at the lovely apartments down in Westminster thanks to Crown Lawn who always look after me!
I have managed not to call husband and fight with him, we have put our ‘Celebrity Death Squabble’ on hold as I try to get everything organised for the Edinburgh fringe, and then we will continue the fight. I am just too busy to argue with the bastard just now, maybe later. He really needs a toffee hammer in his eye when he gets like this.
Last night I went to the Beauberry Restaurant over in West Dulwich, my old mate Ibi owns it. You really need to see this place to appreciate the architecture. It’s an amazing old building that used to be a stately home. The outside is totally white and over looks a beautiful park at the back terrace. The interior was so sharp and classy with cutting edge dynamic design (I think I could be a restaurant critic eh?)
The chairs in the main dining room are the brightest most startling orange you can imagine and they are flocked (fuzzy covered fine texture) this is set against the cool whites of the walls!
Ibi and I had dinner together, it was lovely to see him and eating with the owner in any fancy restaurant is always a delight!
Ibi picked the ‘black cod’ for me. Apparently this is the signature dish that made Nobu restaurant famous.
The fish lives under thick ice and has no fat or thick skin. It is marinated for three days and then roasted….it was heavenly. I cannot tell you how delicious that fish was, and washed down with expensive champagne…I was in heaven.
Ibi and I chatted about old times, I knew him ten years ago when he worked alongside an old mate of mine.
The restaurant really is of the highest standard, I cannot wait to go back there, it has two other bars and upstairs has two separate rooms, one which I may be organising comedy for in late 2006. How exciting! Comedy and good fish!
So today I went to BBC to record the radio show ‘Loose Ends’ I was interviewing TV presenter Ashley Hames about his new TV show on Bravo called Mans World.
The show takes him all over the world as he takes part in some of the most dangerous jobs on the planet including Narcotics Police patrol in Colombia and Tree felling with the Heli loggers in Canada.
He was a really funny and interesting guy, the show is truly fucking funny and addictive so go check it out on Bravo UK. My daughter is a big fan of his and was chuffed that I had chatted to him.
So here I am sitting in on a Saturday night getting ready to go out, trying hard not to admit my eyesight is fucked. I was in the shower and tried to read the back of a shampoo bottle, but I just couldn’t make the words out, I concluded it must be the stuff in my eyes, but when I got out of the shower I tried to read it again and ……there is no chance my eyes can make out the words so I am old and that’s the end of that.
I am off to get knitting patterns and collect pictures of kittens.

Standing in the street screaming into your mobile and swearing so loudly in front of small children isn’t how I saw my life to be perfectly frank.
Older people looked at me with disgust…and so they fucking should. I looked like a scary woman who has managed to convince psychologists to let her out of the psyche ward, yet still had the urge to kill on release.
I will tell you why I am so fucked up and stressed, the original designer of my posters was so inept at Photoshop I had to sit with him and talk him through it step by step, this is fine I hear you say but he was charging me £200 to design my stuff and he wasn’t actually a designer.
So I then had to take my ideas for my two main advert/posters that are going into the Edinburgh Fringe brochure at a cost of £1,200 a pop ( How fucking expensive is that?)….I need to get it right and meet the deadline which is next week and I wont be in Glasgow to proof it. So it all needs to be done by email and txt messages which make me mental.
So there I was standing in the street screaming into my mobile at some unreasonable person who had decided to change the sizes of the lay out.
I have designed the posters, the one for The Point of Yes (my one woman play about a woman’s choice with heroin) I took a photo of my daughter in the street. She was sitting up against a wall in a dirty jacket, burning what appeared to be heroin in a bent spoon. As I was getting the shot this older man passing by shouted at me “That’s a fucking disgrace taking pictures of that poor drug addict, go away ye dirty bastard”
I tried to explain it was a photo shoot until my daughter shouted “Help, I am a junkie and she keeps taking my photos”
The man chased me half way down the street as Ashley sat there and laughed at me.
So I now have that poster image settled and I am very chuffed with it, I need to get the other three done.
I am off to London in the morning; I have work down there and will be catching up with my best mate Monica who has just moved office to fashionable Chelsea, where she lives. I cannot wait to see it and share her celebration of her company getting bigger and more successful.
You can catch me on BBC radio 4 on Saturday at 6pm on Loose Ends.
I will soon have the posters uploaded onto my website, there is also a new live blog on livedigital go there and check it out.

As always my husband who has been nice and speaking lovely to me for days, turned into a snarling fucking evil nasty bastard. He annoyed me, shouted at Ashley and I in turn verbally attacked him.
I stood in the hall and dragged up five things he did in 1986 and two fucked up verbal attacks he hit me with in 1979…he tried to answer but just stood there mumbling. As always I won, he can’t recall anything I said yesterday, so he cannot even begin to shout back any reiteration.
I then realised I had stuff to do so in the middle of the argument I screamed “Look, you cunt I am too busy to fight, here is the abbreviated version of what I would have said, if I had fucking an hour to say it, so here is the short version ‘You are a cunt!”.
This didn’t work, we carried on belittling one another, he was an evil bastard who undermined me since I was 18 years old and he is angry I have a life, I on the other hand am a controlling bitch who remembers every word in the history of the world that anyone ever said, and despises being married to someone who once fucked up years ago….
So after we did this all night, we woke up and carried on again this morning, all through lunch time and right into the afternoon we carried on screaming and crying. Then around 3pm we both looked at each other and he said to me “Are you hungry?”
So we called off the fight to make some lunch, we actually chatted and laughed as we made bread and cheese, as if the two angry fighting people were in another room and we were only shadows of them, we merely inhabited their body when they needed to fight; meanwhile we are buddies who eat together.
How fucked up is that?
So after a while we laughed and made up and finally decided to stop the fight.
That’s what marriage is….a split personality.