THESE past two days I've been gabbing about women in pink bras and lop-sided breasts. Not so long ago they could lock you up for that. Today I've cleaned up my act.
It's the place to go for public or merchant school accents (beats me how they let me in) I've concluded after all these years.
How rich to be assailed by the Queen's English again at the Broughton Place preview of auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull's fin
e antiques sale tomorrow morning.
What caught my connoisseur's eye, a pair of large 19th century terracotta sphinxes in recumbent posture (it said in the catalogue) with long tails swept along their backs (£2000-£3000) from an English country house. Ideal for my fireplace, if I removed the coal scuttle.
More practical, I suppose, the large Austrian 19th century terracotta figure of a young boy playing a tin whistle (£1000-£2000). I'd have room for him in front of the lobby press.
"I'm sure he'd toot his flute for you," smiled L&T valuer Richard Longwill, suggesting that a sale of Wemyss ware and Scottish silver at Broughton Place on August 26 might be up my street.
Or in September, some Chippendale period furniture. The Chippendales themselves won't be there, alas. Are the Chipps still around, one has to wonder.
Real high-flyer Much as I abhor seeing people on pleasure trips in the skies over Edinburgh (a chopper accident still waiting to happen?), the sight and sound of a Dakota overhead last week was a nostalgia moment.
Spins out of Turnhouse at £100 a time on the old warhorse of an aeroplane that made history tugging gliders into Arnhem and airlifting food into beleaguered Berlin.
I'd have been up for it but I'm waiting for somebody to do likewise with a Lancaster or, if they'd dare, a surplus Nimrod.
Afterwords . . . . . You couldn't make it up – the BBC could. Tomorrow night late "Ian Hislop's Scouting for Boys " on 2, his appraisal of Baden-Powell's handbook for Scouts. And Radio 4's Book of the Week," a biog of Casanova read by Benedict Cumberbatch. Cabbagepatch on one's birth certificate must be preferable.
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