I paid a visit to ""Red Raw" night at The Stand comedy club. It is very competitively priced at £1, which just fits in with my present restricted budget.
I was meeting John Burns there. We met doing the "Amused Moose" beginners' comedy course at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. He's based in Inverness but was working for the day in Edinburgh and decided to sample a bit of that old comedy thing.
As ever, it's a really good night. A varied mix of styles and abilities, but generally every act getting a few decent laughs.
The Grampian TV cameras were filming as one of their newsreaders was trying stand-up for the first time as part of the Grampian programme "Just Do It!".
He did fairly well, although as you might expect from a confident, media person he probably wasn't quite as terrified as someone would be with a slightly lower self-esteem, and perhaps in a more mundane kind of job?
I walked to The Stand and back from my flat, shunning the easy availability of buses. This is part of my co-ordinated attempt to become leaner and meaner.
The fitness benefit of walking along Princes St late at night is slightly offset by the clear and present danger of getting in a conflagration with a cluster of aggressive delinquents who patrol this area in a slightly intimidating fashion.
But thinking positively, if I got chased by a gang, the fact that I would have to break into a full sprint for an initially unspecified time and distance, would make the exercise even more demanding and beneficial. Obviously, this benefit would be instantly eroded if they caught up with me and performed a Scottish version of "River Dance" on my head.
So there is obviously a fine line between having a healthy lifestyle and experiencing a violent untimely death.
Thankfully I survived and lived to fight another day.
However I really do want to fight one of my neighbours who is being really obstructive about getting a communal repair done. But now that I've put it in the Blog, I'd better not. It might get out of hand and I might kill him, and now I've left evidence on the Internet of a clear motive, and consequently would be unlikely to get way with it. Damn.
