The Arabs can buy Leith Walk instead

Published on Wednesday 27 February 2008 07:54

SEE this sensational wheeze the oil-rich sheiks reportedly have about buying Princes Street, yep, the entire caboodle . . I'm for it. Five hundred per cent.

The various bodies (bods, I'd rather label them, disrespectfully) to whom the seriously stressed-out street is entrusted obviously can't do anything with it, where the Arabs could.

With them in charge – mind you, I'm an Arab myself, from Leith – they'd scrap the tramcars and introduce camelcars, the locals would be back into pyramid-selling big style, palms in the gardens would mean dates for everybody and no more loitering at Binns Corner, gigs by Oasis and the Blue Nile on the bandstand, a remake of Lawrence of Arabia starring perma-tanned Tommy Sheridan and sultana cakes as the staple diet.

So, everybody, let's go for it. What are we waiting for? Let's sheikh, rattle and roll. Can I just add that if this deal can't be hatched with the Arabs, could they instead kindly purchase Leith Walk top to bottom?

Talking oil, There Will Be Blood is gurgling in it. I've just seen at the Cameo how its star Daniel Day-Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar. Mind blowing.What a performance, what a movie!

Surge on, Bob

I have to keep prodding General Sir Robert Richardson about his memoirs. High time they emerged from the melting pot at his East Lothian home. I may have to resort to a jab with the tip of a bayonet.

But I'm on a promise. "I'm at the stage where I'm a subaltern with the Ist Battalion Royal Scots in Germany in 1952 in the wake of the Berlin Airlift," General Bob explains.

"I'll make a good surge – that's what they do in Iraq – with the memoirs these next few months because, God willing, I'll be 80 in March next year. There's much to write about."

The early chapters will cover his school days at Heriot's. A touch of the old school tie (I wear one myself) is guaranteed, and why not?

Now crack on with it, Bob, let's have you!

Afterwords . .

I could be weaned back on to the beer when I'm reminded that Jilly Goolden once declared a wine tasted like unwashed cows' udders (pull the other one) and of a red she opined: "It smells like gumboots drying by the Aga."