John Gibson: Damn bad show for the RAF

I’ll tell you this. Had our fighter escorts left it this late to meet up with the bombers – the Lancasters and the like – over the Channel, en route to Germany, we’d have lost the war.

The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund invited me to a reception to be held in the Castle’s Great Hall tomorrow night. And, of course, it’s nice to be remembered. The Chief of the Air Force will be there.

However, the invite, signed by Group Captain Bob Kemp, below, who runs the Fund’s Edinburgh branch, reached me here on Good Friday, a holiday, with the holiday weekend to follow.

Damn bad show, I’d say. Hardly up to the finest traditions of the Royal Air Force. Had the invite arrived with reasonable notice I’d have de-mothballed my best blue, burnished the buttons, super-polished the shoes.

Besides, I’d have asked the chief’s adjutant to fix it for me on the night to have a conspiratorial word in his boss’s ear. This is how our war would have been lost.

Kerr was a keeper

Edinburgh street scene. Driver jumps out of his cab and asks “John, is Jimmy Kerr still living?”

“Dead a long time”, I snap, and we both went about our business. Jimmy was a great keeper for Fifties Hibs, not capped nearly enough for Scotland.

Afterwords . .

... Joan Collins, pictured, on matters financial: “I’ve been blessed in many ways but I’ve also had quite a lot of s*** thrown. Mostly by men trying to take money from me, whether it’s a husband or boyfriend or an adviser or the taxman.”