Gullane.

I did some rehearsals last week in a beautiful village on the east coast of Scotland called Gullane; it's about 20 miles from Edinburgh and could probably qualify as a small town.

I have a cousin who lives there, Patrick Tuite, and spent time there in my youth with my brother and Pat's mother and father; Tom and Peggy Tuite.

It's a wonderful village and we bought some meat in the local butchers which came from local farmers; we also bought some black pudding and white pudding and I had some for breakfast this morning with a sausage and egg. I have to say it's not as good as the white pudding you get in Ireland but I would, chauvinistically, say that wouldn't I?

I must have been about 16 when I was there as a youth with my brother – also named Pat – and we managed to get a job at a visiting fairground. We collected the money on the dodgem cars; this involved going from car to car, standing on the bumpers and leaning across to the young girls, trying to impress them and taking their money. Then we would jump, very dramatically, to the next car trying to impress those girls too; if they were girls.

We would hold that bar at the back, the bar that took the power to the ceiling of the structure which pumped the power into the cars. The bars were quite safe to hold onto but if you went from car to car and held the bar an both cars at the same time you got a nasty shock down your arm and up the other. When you're feeling this sensation you are trying to look sexy as the girls can see you leaping from car to car like Tarzan and they probably mistook that yell of pain from the electricity for a Tarzan yell and probably looked at us with a whatareyoudoing look on their faces.

The people who worked full time at the fairground tried to teach us how to give the punters the wrong change.

The idea was that the people in the cars gave you their money; the cars are ready to go as everything has to be quick so you give them the change quickly after showing them the correct amount in your hand – when you turn your hand over, you keep a tanner between two fingers, and they will just dump the change into their pockets and drive away without checking it.

A tanner by the way for anybody under about 50 was a sixpence.

We didn't swindle anybody a) because we were honest and b) because we couldn't do the act of prestidigitation even if we had wanted to.

Our cousin Pat, by the way, and I'll call him Part to distinguish him from my brother Pat, as that is what his name sounds like in a Scottish accent was even tempered, tall and always wore a black mac which was double breasted and belted. In fact from a distance he looked like a cop.

When the day came for us to get paid we went up to the boss for our money and we were sent on a wild goose chase from one person to the other.

Then we reached Mister Big – the boss - and he said that "ye're no' getting paid today; come back tomorrow!"

We knew that they would not be there 'tomorrow' as the fair was moving on – and we told them that.

"Och!! ye thank we gonna make off wicha bliddy muney do ye? Eh? See you - wicha blidy money . . ."

Pat and I then realised we either had to go and forget about it or stay for a kicking!

A shout “Hey Christy – Pat?”

We turned around and it was Part; dressed in his copper's mac.

"Who's thart?" said Mister Big "the blidy polis??”

"That's our cousin."

He took a queer look at Part.

" Yer cousin!! Yer blidy cousins . . . Here!"he said "here's your blidy money."

And he gave us the money.

Off we went with Part.

He is still in the village and we bumped into him in the street before we even went around to knock on his door.

His mother Peggy, our aunt Peggy, used to be Ronnie Corbet's housekeeper as he lives in Gullane.

Her husband Tom was from Dublin, my mother's younger brother – they died within a day of each other – joined the Royal Air Force as a lad and retired, with Peggy, to Gullane. He worked at Muirfield golf course and Part worked at the other golf course in Gullane. The whole place is crazy about golf.

When you see young kids with a basketball in Los Angeles or a football in London, in Scotland you see them with golf clubs; they play golf on waste ground, parks and anywhere they can hit a ball.

I don't know if many golf champions are Scottish but it surely is the national sport of Scotland.

After we met Part in the street the other day we walked up to where the fairground used to be – and there, lo and behold, was the visiting fair once again (above).

A Bit of Irish at the Edinburgh Fringe.

There it is – the new guitar above. I am pictured rehearsing in a hall in Gullane, East Lothian Scotland. A cousin of mine lives just around the corner in this beautiful little seaside village and Margaret, my wife, snapped a few shots as I was singing.

So it's a 'get in' on Thursday, then a tech in the evening, a dress rehearsal on Friday evening, a preview on Saturday then we open on Monday. In between those two will be a 'meet the press' reception and I suppose I'll have to put some trousers on for that.

After that I'll be writing from a different blog address which will be the same as this but instead of the title storyteller it will be A Bit of Irish blogspot etc. I won't be doing much writing, as such, more like posting reviews – good or bad.

Last week I saw a superb film – Inception; starring Leonardo di Caprio and directed by Christopher Nolan.

I know some people will try to be clever and say it's based on some other story or some other film but what story isn't? The bottom line is it's terrific and the music, by Hans Zimmer, will probably win an Academy Award.

The idea of the film is sharing dreams; being able to go into someone else's dream and experience it. To what purpose, you might ask, but if you think about it you would be able to see what the other person sees in their dreams; be able to see their secrets.

I have dreamt about reading the paper and know that I cannot read anything new in it as it isn't inside my head yet so I'm more likely to see a headline like 'Kennedy Assassinated' as opposed to anything in the future.

If someone has discovered something it would be very handy to get into their dream, look over their shoulder and steal their idea wouldn't it? And that is what the film is about.

When you die in your dreams you wake up and that is an important factor in the movie; they dream about someone going to sleep and they go to sleep and dream in that sleep too and dreams on that level happen at different speeds from the other levels so in the movie you have three different levels happening at the same time and at different speeds; it all starts off at the beginning when you put the idea into someone else's head – the inception; try and catch it at your local cinema. I saw it at the Coronet in Notting Hill which is a wonderful old picture house which was built during silent movie times.

So that's it till next week when I'll be writing from Fringe Central – and I'll keep you up to date on the FedEx claim for my guitar.

Gullane and the Academy Awards.

Well it's been over a week since I made a contribution to the blog with a post but here I am back and ready.

There are a lot of other things I have to do; I have to write my novel, organise my one man show for the Edinburgh Festival and do my taxes.

What appears to be taking a lot of time is the one man show; I did the classic thing of registering my show on the Edinburgh Fringe web site and then forgetting what user name and password I had chosen.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem as all you do in that case is click on 'reminder of password' and it gets e-mailed to you automatically but there is one snag.

AT&T in the form of SBCGlobal are my servers and they put a block on foreign domain names they do not recognise. So when the reminder came to me from the web site in question it was blocked and sent back. The name of the domain where the e-mails were coming from was edfringe and edfringe might look a bit shifty to a computer.

So I have made many a phone call to Scotland over the past week and it still isn't sorted out. The big problem with calling them is that they finish work at 6:00 pm so all the calls have to be made before 10:00 am Los Angeles time. If the person I want is in a meeting they never get out of it before the end of their day.

So it's a bit of a bind.

There is a place called Gullane which is a small town – or more like a village -on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland. It's about twenty to thirty miles from Edinburgh and in it there is a village hall which I want to use for a few rehearsals before the show; there it is above.

I know of the hall, and Gullane, because my uncle used to live there. He had half a Dublin accent and half a Scottish one and my dad couldn't understand a word he said.

When I was staying there with my brother, many years ago, we took a job in Gullane at the fair ground collecting the fares on the Dodgem Cars.

The first thing we were taught to do was to give incorrect change to the punters. It's something I never did but our boss, who was a little fella who wore a hat with a feather in it, would show us how to let the customer see the change in our hand and then as we put it into their hand we would somehow keep a coin in the folds of our fingers; I don't think I could have done it even if I'd wanted to.

We collected the fare when the cars started to move and we had to jump between them and kind of flatter and chat up the girls to try to keep them in for another ride; I liked doing that.

The thing you couldn't do was to touch two cars at the same time as the electricity would go through you and give you a nasty shock. I can still feel the pain from trying it once – it wasn't touching cars exactly, but the bar that was on the back which would reach the ceiling of the rink to give power to each car.

There was that, of course, and trying to avoid being hit by the cars.

I remember it took us some time to get paid too as the people running the dodgems tried to get away with it.

My cousin, who still lives in Gullane, always reminds me of the time my brother Pat and me worked at the fair ground.

So I think a nice little drive out to Gullane each time I rehearse would be nice and pleasant when I am there and I can get some fish and chips with my wife and wander along the beach.

When I go there I have another blog which I will be posting so I hope you will be able to follow me there.

It's been over a week since the Academy Awards and I wasn't too disappointed with the outcome. I'm glad Hurt Locker won but I would have liked to have seen Up in the Air win. It was a brilliant script and well performed and was about a man who thought he had everything but he didn't and it was a really good satire on America. Try and see it if you can; it's not a rip roaring comedy or a thriller but well worth a watch.

I asked a friend of mine if he enjoyed the Academy Awards and he said that they were a load of shit; a blatant publicity stunt.

Well you know who am I to argue with that; but people enjoy them. I always do and loved last year with Hugh Jackman; I didn't expect Stave Martin and Alec Baldwin to be like that but they were good in their own way.

I know it's a publicity thing but at least members of the academy get to vote – so it's real as far as that's concerned but it's only their opinion. There is never a degree of difficulty point like in the diving at the Olympic games so it really is very hard to say whose performance is better than anyone else's?

Is it harder to play a country 'n' western singer than a company executive? It depends doesn't it – I mean it would be harder for me to play a country n' western singer than Jeff bridges as he is almost there.

And what about directing? What about it I hear you say.

There was one scene in The Hurt Locker when the chap – the protagonist – was trying to defuse a bomb in a car; that scene was almost perfect and it was made up of good acting, good placement of the camera shots and – most importantly – good editing.

What kind of direction went into that scene? We will never know, of course, but the director's job is to get the performance from the actor; a discussion with the Director of Photography about the camera angles too but the main job is to make it believable and if the actor is not believable – over the top, playing it too small or just plain unbelievable – the whole thing is ruined.

The director has to tell the actor, if he doesn't know, what the character wants, what he has just been through and then has to tell him, using the correct words, how he is doing.

If the director tells the actor he is a load of shit where is that going to get him? If the director tells the actor how good he is that could be counterproductive too – the correct words need to be used I repeat.

That is why I am glad Avatar didn't win; I haven't seen the film but every time someone tells me about it they tell me of the 3D effects and the magic but I have yet to hear anyone tell me about the acting.

With regards to how important and correct the awards are I will say one of the greatest actors never recaived an Academy Award for any of his performances; I'm talking of Charlie Chaplin.