Edinburgh is the most pressurised environment to do comedy. You get an hour. There's no compere. You'd better be on the money straight away; you've got journalists in.
I don't like false modesty.
It's not cool to be star-struck.
I am a professional comedian, a published novelist, and a general wit for hire.
I am the first to admit that I have never been a household name.
I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom - with little success.
It is the natural order of things that successive generations will achieve more than their predecessors.
Stand-up comedy is not for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned.
There is nothing quite as loud as the silence of an audience when a comedian is on stage.
Many years ago, I was a young and, dare I say it, very hot new comedian. Maybe even the hottest of all if the now defunct Perrier panel of judges were to be believed.
My story is comic because I've spent vast amounts of effort trying to become a Hollywood screenwriter and made no direct effort on making my son a movie actor.
I just talk about the funny things in my life, and the idea is that my observations reflect the lives of my audience - so people are really laughing at themselves. This is the theory, anyway, and I am aware that in print, that it doesn't appear to be very funny. But it is, and I am definitely funny.
Doing stand-up is not normal. People fear public speaking above all other things, and I am no different.
Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.
I must say that I am rather partial to funny dog videos.
As a parent, I often wonder what I should be encouraging my kids to do for a career.
It's because finance is so baffling that makes being an economist such a safe option. It nestles down comfortably with psychiatry and astrology as a profession where getting it patently wrong is just not a problem - and also, rather wonderfully, seems to have no adverse affect on their professional standing whatsoever.
I am not a natural show-off. Some of the monster comedians are terrifyingly assured, and I don't have that, and that's held me back.
I'm a confident person next to the guy in the street, but if you go into the showbiz world, it seems the guys who are most successful are the most confident, and I don't think I fit into that category.
The house I've bought in London, the holidays, everything has been bought from making people laugh, and if you'd said to me when I was 14 that's how I was going to make my living, I would have smiled from ear to ear.
