Laurie Graham

I thought I’d better give the wig and head-dress a final check before I chuck  layer them with tissue paper and place them tenderly in my suitcase.  You may think this looks more like Fairy Don’t Mess With Me than sweet, kind-hearted Fairy Cobweb, but what I was actually saying was, ‘cut  the top off of my head…

The last, but by no means least important item to go in my Panto bag of tricks will be bananas. I can’t abide an over-ripe banana so I’ll buy them from the Billa supermarket before proceeding to the theatre. The banana is a most useful fruit. A preventative against both Waiting in the Wings foot…

  So here we go. After more than a year of thinking about it, talking about it, and stitching on sequins for it, we’re less than two weeks from Curtain Up. Sleeping Beauty opens on January 12th at the Teatro Avogaria in Venice. The director tells me he’s not sleeping well. I know exactly why.  No…

   These are the new Nike trainers Americans recently queued to buy. The lines started forming soon after midnight, some stores had their doors ripped off their hinges and, inevitably, when the starting gun was fired, those who were a little slow off the mark got trampled under foot. As far as I’ve been able to…

Feelings were definitely running high at the supermarket this morning. White-knuckled women, over-filled trolleys, a gap in the shelf where the Heat’n’Serve Mulled Wine should be. And it’s only December 22nd. But as one of those fortunate people who will be someone else’s guest on Christmas Day, I’m outta there. Which is not to say all is calm and…

 We’re doing pretty well for cards so far. Only one ‘Holiday Greetings’ and one ‘Happy Hogmanay’. Baby Jesus is otherwise prominently in evidence. It’s going to be interesting to see whether the next generation are getting the message. Our grandson Alex is in Year 2 of a church school so he should know his Magi from…

Here’s a nice little story that illustrates what happens if you overburden a population with regulations. Eventually the spiritless majority will jump off a cliff if required to do so. But a few will refuse. There will always, thank God, be a few. This incident took place on an evening commuter train in Scotland a few days ago. There was a…

   Nick Clegg, who is apparently ‘jolly cross’ that David Cameron made his firm stand against Sark and Merk without a final, ‘just-checking’ phone call to him, has emerged from his bunker long enough to make a statement to the press. What he fears, he said, is that if Britain leaves the EU, she will become a…

This is is Stephanie Blythe, of whom more in a minute. First my Sunday afternoon trawl through the week’s idiocies. Well, there was the public sector strike that turned into an extra shopping opportunity and an easy day to fly into Heathrow. I noticed a lot of PCS banners in the news reports. Many years ago I was briefly a…

The following exchange took place over lunch. Mrs F: So on Christmas Eve I thought we’d have the grandchildren for the afternoon. Give the girls a chance to get on with their preparations. Mr F: What preparations?