Something out of my old kit bag

TEETOTAL and anecdotal. You're not getting the real me today. Actually, you're getting something from all my yesterdays.

You might say my relationship with that bad Eartha Kitt went beyond the bounds of respectability. We were caught, just after seven in the morning in the Edinburgh Sheraton, playing footsie under our breakfast table.

Newspapers then were the to-die-for occupation. Our frisky frat didn't make the Sundays but "South Carolina Cotton-pickin' Mother's Showbiz Daughter Torments Louche Leith Hack" might have filled a few pars down the page in The People.

What's reminding me of that encounter . . . Miss Kitt is back in the UK from her Connecticut home and on Monday she was to open the Cheltenham Jazz Festival. Why couldn't we have her do likewise for the Edinburgh Jazzfest this August?

Good question. More so when my EIJF chums, agog in this their 30th anniversary year, are still putting the show together. Perhaps they have and the names are "classified", like the MoD classify.

To return, hastily, to Miss Kitt, in her prime frequently in our charts, is owning up now: "I do not have an act. I just do Eartha Kitt. Eartha Kitt is my act and I am still learning from her. Not that I want be perfect.

"I do not believe in perfection. What do you do with perfection? I want to be whoever Eartha Kitt is until the gods take me wherever they take me."

I want to be the only journo in these parts entitled to claim to have footsied at dawn with Eartha, once described by Orson Welles as "the most exciting woman in the world".

Too many notes
You gasped and yelled "michty me!" on hearing that Scottish scientists have developed an iPod that stores up to half a million songs. Has your gob ever been so smacked?

What's the point? Acres of music on one contraption. I mean, who needs it? They call it nanotechnology. Is this all these fiendishly inventive bods have to do? Wouldn't their talents be better employed working on something more beneficial to society? Like Alzheimer's, the big C or surgically removing Brown and his cronies from Westminster?

One wonders whether Sydney Devine's Eighteen Yellow Roses Came Today will be wilting among those half-million ditties.