Promise and Promiscuity is a one woman musical parody of a Jane Austen novel.  All the essential characters are there; a poor widow with daughters to be married, a noble minded heroine and her slightly silly sister, a rich but unattractive male cousin with designs on our heroine, a wealthy and attractive young neighbour down from town, his disapproving mamma, his austere and somewhat arrogant friend and his pretty but vacuous childhood friend destined in the eyes of their families to be his wife.

The actress inhabits each of these characters superbly switching voice and bearing in a trice to move effortlessly between them -- pursed lips and fingers gripped across the waist for mama's snobbish drawl, tummy stuck out as cousin who lumbers about, his speech punctuated by little snorts.

She takes us briskly with abundant humour and jolly songs through the typical Austen tale of misunderstandings, unwanted declarations of love, antipathy that morphs into admiration and so forth to the ultimate happy ending.

No Austen novel is complete without a ball and for that I was chosen as dancing partner - the perils of sitting in the front row.  So I appeared on the Fringe this year after all.

Oran Mor is well known for its Play, Pie and Pint series of short plays.  It also produces a summer panto apparently so I went to see their 2015 offering The Pie Eyed Piper of Hamilton.

No cast of thousands with lavish sets and costumes here but a cast of four and some simple painted flats.   It's mildly satirical and not quite so mildly rude and one hundred percent cheerfully energetic.

City State is suffering a plague of rats.  The flaxen locked mayor and his side kick drive north to Hamilton and engage the eponymous piper who in return for a promise of Buckie for life comes south to clear the rats with his magic pipe, actually bagpipes are needed.  Unfortunately clearing the rats has made possible an invasion of jocks and we are treated to a speech from a blonde haired wee Glaswegian lassie sporting what look suspiciously like an SNP badge on her lapel.

All ends merrily with the unrolling of a blind bearing the words of the pantomime song that we are all then obliged to sing.  I can remember only the opening lines - "Pit some heather up yer kilt/stick some bracken doon yer breeks".

It was not awful but I won't be going to their next one.

That may have been crude but for some real filth, filth with literary merit you couldn't do better that Irvine Welsh at the Book Festival.  In the course of an entertaining hour long interview/chat he read a hilarious passage describing a funeral from his latest novel A Decent Ride.  I know his work only from films but after that feel encouraged to tackle a novel or two.