If you are heading south for the New Year to escape our sub zero temperatures why not take a young gannet with you.

That's the appeal I heard this morning from the North Berwick Seabird Centre. Apparently a chick was deserted when the 150,000 or so gannets that breed on the Bass Rock left for warmer climes in October.

He was rescued from the rock a few weeks ago as you can see in the video but according to this report he now needs a lift at least as far as Gibraltar to have a chance of growing up so if there's room in your executive jet give the Centre a ring.

I thought my electronic Christmas card was pretty neat but swelled with pride on learning from my webhost on Christmas Eve that my bandwidth allowance for the month had been exceeded and the site would be off-line until 1st January.

Goodness me! The original recipients must have been so impressed that they had to share the pleasure with all their contacts, who in turn......until bingo - hits of google like proportions forced my site off the road.

An apologetic email arrived on Boxing Day. Turns out to have been a flaw in the bandwidth usage checking program. It's easily done. I once caused lots of grief by coding > instead of >= or maybe the other way around. In any event the supply of certain plastic oddments to Woolworths was thrown into disarray, but I don't believe that to have contributed materially to their demise.

Edinburgh readers will recognise this as a bus tracker. They have been sprouting up beside our bus stops over the last couple of years and tell you how long it will be until the next bus arrives.

They are a lot more useful than a printed timetable displayed in an awkward corner of an unlit bus shelter. But bus trackers have not reached all parts of the city.

I was out at the Western General the other day getting a yellow fever jag and arrived at the stop for my return journey. No tracker, so I peered at the timetable. According to that I had arrived one minute before the single solitary bus that passes that stop was due.

After eight minutes shivering in the wind and rain, the shelter was against vertical weather only - my bald head would have been protected from sunstroke , I gave up and set off on foot. You've guessed the rest; I had not gone 50 yards when the 42 swept past.

Now that was annoying but less so than the recurrence of lift lunatic activity. Here is yesterday's
find. What is to be done?

And much less annoying than having a mouse run up your leg inside your jeans as you sit peacefully at the table. But it won't do it again. I just hope that's a warning to any of its little friends who may be lurking around. Photographs of the corpse are available on request.

Christmas cards are starting to arrive. I really want to abandon physical cards entirely in favour of wholly electronic greetings but I may have to send one or two. I shan't be able to send one to whoever forgot to sign their card so I hope they also read my blog and get pleasure from these, which I offer to all my readers with best wishes for the festive season and its aftermath.

Iain Heggie's "A Wholly Healthy Glasgow" was a Fringe (or maybe even EIF) hit that I saw and thoroughly enjoyed sometime in the 80s. I hadn't seen anything else of his since - a fact I regret especially since his biog tells me that he has adapted Marivaux, a big fav of mine - until last night.

"The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer" is also a Glasgow based piece but very different. It's a fairly gentle, even whimsical story set in the 18th century whose running gag is its protagonist's astonishment at a medium's forecasts of what's to be in the Glasgow of the future - horseless carriages, a receptacle box containing a five inch high town crier in every drawing-room (the same town crier what's more), water closets even for the poor, and so forth. It was a script that raised laughter in other ways as well.

A friend I met in the bar decried the fact that much of the humour sprang from local references and maintained that even if the references had been to his home town of Dundee he would have held the same opinion. I suppose it may seem a slightly cheap way of getting an audience on side, although one might question to what extent an Edinburgh audience would be sympathetic to weegie allusions or vice versa but I for one enjoyed that aspect, as well as the humour that he drew from more universal themes - father/daughter, modern/old-fashioned, wealthy old man/poor young suitor, tricky businessman/naive investor.

Now this was a one man show ably and impressively performed but what impressed me even more was the fact that in addition to actor and director the programme credits no less than fourteen people as having a hand in the production and another eleven individuals or institutions are thanked for their help.

Would that that ratio might be replicated for my show.

Tattie Shaws is an excellent vegetable shop up the road that I try to patronise rather than weakly add pre-packed veggies to my Tesco basket.

In there this morning for a head of garlic. Isn't it an annoying habit of supermarkets to sell them in packs of three - what non-Transylvanian one person household can get through three heads before they go rotten? I spotted this delicacy and thought I'd better try it. Tattie, or is it Shaw?, assured me that I'd love it and he was right. It's a stotter.

Made I assume by the guy whose flavoured porridge stall you see around from time to time. It may look like solidified porridge but it's not. It's made from the oats and he does a range of flavours. They contain butter but I'm pleased to report that it's unsalted, another improvement on Tesco.

I did a little bit of catching up with Little Dorrit via the BBC's wonderful Iplayer before watching this week's episode last night. So many sites that offer video streaming would do well to find out how the BBC do it.

Anyway that aside I am so much enjoying LD. Of course to start with the material is first class. Dickens' imagination and character drawing are superb. He can give us caricatures of villains as evil as evil can be and of goody goodies too sweet to be true, but more rounded portraits too. I'm particularly intrigued by Fanny Dorrit at the moment as she shows a sensitivity and vulnerability at odds with what we gleaned of her character earlier.

That in part is tribute to her acting. Not only the girl who plays Fanny but every single player is magnificent. The adaptation (not that I've read the book so my appreciation is of the TV drama that Davies has created), the direction, the camera work, the costumes - the whole shebang is a triumph.

I'd love to see Walter Scott's novels get the same treatment.

I was tempted out to the golf course by yesterday's bright sunshine and flashed my old codger's card in the expectation of 18 holes for next to nothing. Alas I should have been like Cinderella and kept my eye on the clock. At midnight on Fridays my magic card turns to dust and for 48 hours I have to pay the full whack.

I went for it just the same because it was a lovely day and after 9 holes had scored 46 which, had it not been for one duff shot would have been 44. So I went into the back 9 full of confidence that I had an excellent chance of reaching and perhaps breaching my hitherto barrier of 92.

Now Craigentinny is not a long course nor a particularly tricky course but it had enough up its sleeve yesterday to thwart me, indeed to annihilate me, a lost ball on the 17th just turning the knife in the wound.

Cinders got her Prince in the end. Will I eventually score?

As well as having all those handy buses (minus the 13) I'm surrounded by shops and practically have to walk through Tesco to get anywhere.

Last week Scot Mid revamped their store that lies some 300 paces further from my door and passing it last night on my way back from earning an easy 30 quid giving my input to an ad focus group I popped in.

It's just another supermarket of course so hardly exciting, but they have rejigged the layout and seem to have conjured up enough space to display a greater range of foods than before, including an uncountable number of butter substitutes and what's more to the point three brands of unsalted butter.

I've recently had words with Tesco over their piles of salted butter and nary an unsalted pack but they have failed to heed me. Scot Mid used to be as bad but now that they have turned over a new leaf I may abandon Tesco in their favour.

Can I remember the old Co-op number to get the divi as well?