Tim Cornwell's arts diary: Erotic credentials open the door to Number 11

Published on Wednesday 13 May 2009 20:24

OUR own Kate Copstick, The Scotsman's feared and admired comedy critic, headed to 11 Downing Street this week for the Waverley Care party.

The Chancellor Alistair Darling and his wife, Maggie, hosted the event to celebrate the 20th birthday of the Scottish charity, supporting people with HIV and Hepatitis C and their families.

In a happy constellation of birthdays, it also marked the 25th anniversary of the Pleasance – the Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue which has supported the charity for 18 years, to the tune of about 150,000.

Miss Copstick, a patron of Waverley Care, forgot her passport, or indeed any other ID. Searching her bag for anything to convince the three armed gentlemen on the gate to let her in, she found a copy of the Erotic Review.

Copstick has written for the famous rumpy-pumpy rag for years, and recently bought it. "I have a copy of the Erotic Review," she cried. "I own it!" After she brandished the cover with her name on it, and showed her latest article, a "deeply personal polemic against having sex outdoors," they obligingly let her through. The magazine was left behind.

Darling's modest abode

AS MP for Edinburgh Central, Darling was an early patron of Solas, Waverley Care's community project building in Abbeymount. The charity's purpose-built hospice, Milestone House, now run as an intensive respite centre, is in Oxgangs, in his current Edinburgh Pentlands constituency.

Waverley Care now has a budget of about 1.5 million a year and about 50 staff supporting 6-700 people.

Fringe legend Christopher Richardson, director of the Pleasance when it held its first Waverley benefit, was among about 120 guests.

"What struck me was what a modest little house he (Darling] lived in when all that fuss was going on about expenses," he says. "How modest the palace of power was compared to every other place in the world."

Current Pleasance director Anthony Alderson said the event was about "two charities working in partnership". Stephen K Amos was among the comedians in attendence, he recalls, plus "some pop star, I don't know who she was… Shirley Manson… you'll have to Google her..."

Still giving a xxxx

THE New Town set was shocked – shocked – by James "laugh-a-minute" Kelman, inset, who was on fine form in a reading at Waterstone's of his newest novel, Kieron Smith, boy.

Kelman is an international Scottish literary star, who won the Booker for How Late It Was, How Late in 1994, a choice that saw one judge walk out in rage, perhaps inspired by its 4,000-plus uses of the f-word.

At 62, he is the only UK contender on the shortlist for the Mann Booker International Prize, announced later this month. At Waterstone's, he proved he hasn't lost his knack for stirring it.

The author fielded questions such as whether and why his novels, written in the voice of working-class Glasgow, were mostly read by middle-class people.

Kelman, our sources report, said he was not the "f***ing publisher", that people didn't ask other writers who read their books and why did they ask him?

Kelman compared himself to Nigerian writers, trying to use English in the way local people would use it.

He was inspired by American, German and Russian writers, not those from England, and particularly not Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.

Asked if prejudice against Scottish literature had improved in the last 20 years, he said it hadn't.