John Gibson: Making waves by the Shore

I'm no stranger on the Shore in Leith and I'm hearing from Mike Phillips, who with wife Michelle runs Mimi's Bakehouse by the water there, that the city council is to splash a six-figure sum to tart up part of the waterfront opposite.

Mike's conversation is more animated recalling the penalty drama of an Easter Road clash with Leeds in '73-74 and a couple of colourful decades as a cabbie. Also their ten-year tenure of a Clerk Street eaterie called Broons, where Oor Wullie failed the head waiter interview.

You don't fake it with Mike and Mimi, you bake it.

Serious stuff

Waxing miserable. Prone to severe depression, Ruby Wax says people with mental illness should be able to get together: "We don't have church any more, not really, and we don't have the wise old woman of the village, your doctor doesn't have time for you and now you have to pay a shrink 80 an hour."

Ruby's saying, further, she no longer thinks she's funny. Maybe not quite as much as you were but today I guess I'm smitten with a smidgeon of depression myself. It's catching.

Act your rage

Clearing her throat before Mariella Frostrup says so: "I know a lot of women my age who are keeping their heads down, hoping no-one will notice they are getting older. Me? I'll be raging and screaming when they try to give me the chop. Actually, I'm already shouting about it." Actually, Mariella's 48.

Afterwords . .

. . . I hang on to Alan Bennett's every word - well, a lot of them - and here are more worth preservation: "I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment."