Happy Birthday Angus Ashman (satisfyingly you can follow all the links back through each of the blogs to find all my entries about him, well, apart from this one). I hope that if I keep doing this that June 12th will be declared Angus Ashman Day. In celebration of him. The non-car door opening pussy. And all-round top bloke.

The countdown to Edinburgh has now well and truly begun. After this weekend I am gigging on all but about three nights, until I head up to the city, so hopefully I can whip the show into shape. Tonight I was dreading having to do a full hour at Up the Arts, as I have a lot of work to do and thought I would run out of steam. But the small room was jam packed with lovely people who wanted to laugh and I comfortably managed 45 minutes of all new stuff (before giving them one old routine as a reward), managing to get off book for a lot of it and just tell the stories. I am not sure how much of it will be in the final show, as I concentrated on mainly talking about my early (lack of) love life, but it was good to see that people would listen to the stories and I managed to conjure up quite a few new ideas and on the way home, my mind buzzing, came up with even more. It's always much better to do this stuff on stage, as the mind is concentrated and with the audience behind you, you can really start to fly. I have been worrying that some of the stuff might be a bit whimsical and sweet and maybe even mawkish, but people seemed to get what I was going for and appreciate that this is largely an attempt for me to discover how I have become who I am. It's not as stand-uppy as the last three shows, but what I love about Edinburgh is that it allows a performer to take chances and try something different.

I am certainly not going to rest on my laurels - this is a complicated show and there are many ideas that I want to explore and it's going to take a lot of work to get it anywhere near where I want it to be - but as I walked back from the tube station, after a show that had gone so much better than I could have hoped, I had a feeling that I might be on to something rather special this time. Edfringe.com is still not working, but you can be keen and book ahead at the Underbelly site. I have a sneaking (and doubtless hubristic) suspicion that the tide is turning my way and that I might manage to sell the show out this year, so don't miss out by leaving it til the last minute!

There are seven weeks to go and I have a little bubble of excitement in my stomach already - unless that's just another big burp brewing. It's going to be a lot of fun knocking this thing together.

In other news I have discovered a great little gift box of Green and Black's chocolate bars, with a dozen tiny 15 gram bars in it. If I eat one a day then I can get a little burst of chocolate for only 90 calories and (unless I just wolf down the whole box) no temptation to eat the rest of the bar, because there is no more bar! Since coming back to chocolate I have managed to keep my previous addiction very much in check and far from needing to eat four bars a day I have managed to just have a little bit every now and again, keeping it (largely) inside my daily calorific allowance. I used to be quite convinced that I couldn't control my impulses when it came to this stuff, but this was just a convenient excuse for my gluttony. It's really nice to be able to have the occasional bar of chocolate or glass of wine or beer, without having t go crazy. I am perhaps beginning to acquire a thin person's perspective that there aren't "bad" foods that you mustn't touch (and once you do touch them you might as well say "fuck it" and go crazy). You just need to be aware of how much you're eating. To be honest, in the old days when I might eat a whole massive bar of chocolate in five minutes I got about the same amount of taste and pleasure as I do from a couple of pieces. Most of it never even touched the sides. In fact I got less pleasure because afterwards I would feel guilty and sick with myself and then eat more chocolate to try and make myself feel better (managing to miss the point a little). A couple of hundred of calories of chocolate a day isn't going to do much harm.

It's good to realise that the year is almost six months old and yet still I am sticking to my diet and still (slowly) losing weight. It's not so much a diet now, as just a new eating and exercise pattern. Be interesting to see if it's still in place after Edinburgh, though I am relatively confident it will be.

In fact I seem unusually confident about everything.

Is this the emotion that you Earthlings call happiness?

It's been a while, but it's good to have it back.

Buy Collings and Herrin T-shirts here and AIOTM T shirts here.

For details of the Christ on a Bike tour click here and you can book tickets here for The Lyric Comedy Nights

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