Edinburgh Fringe Day 20 — Nom, nom, nom.

At least I think it's day 20. It gets a bit confusing sometimes, probably because Adam has been here and my carefully thought out daily routine went completely to pot.

I'm pretty careful with my diet — it hasn't been perfect up here by any means but I've been doing what I can to eat healthily with some holiday treats. But today, that went right out of the window. Fabulous.

We met up for lunch and chomped our way through a pretty amazing Japanese meal at Koyama in Forrest Road, just by all the major Fringe venues like the BBC and Underbelly. Pork ramen, seaweed, pickled vegetables and loads of green tea.

And then we went to the National Museum of Scotland for the afternoon. Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. It's a really eclectic mix of things with an old-fashioned mini next to a 19th century grand piano next to pots and jars. The building itself is worth visiting just for its beauty.

We looked at their Egyptian section with the mummified queen (or at least very high-ranking lady) with

her baby, the Natural history section with the skeleton of the pre-historic giant sloth that was nearly as big as their Tyrannosaurus Rex, Jackie Stewart's championship-winning race car, Dolly the sheep—the first cloned sheep, looking manic and bemused as only a sheep can. She was bigger than I expected, certainly bigger than our Dartmoor sheep, but not any less bemused.

We looked at statues of Buddha and a whole section on Hindu Gods and at Roman statues and ceremonial costumes and watched the six minute show that was about how the Universe began. The Chinese girl next to me spent all six minutes checking her messages on her phone and then wandered off having seen nothing, but that's really her business, I guess. It was a good, simple presentation and Adam and I agreed that it was entirely Kabbalah—the breath or word of God working its way down through the four worlds of creation.

We had tea. We looked at the Scottish galleries with claymores the size of a house and the Lewis chess set made of wales' teeth and walrus ivory. We pottered round the shop We had a wonderful time.

Then we went to a frozen yoghurt shop and had yummy rubbish, synthetic stuff covered with fruit and sprinkles and I felt about eight years old and very happy.

So, off to Ryrie's we go, to meet Jonathan Hipkiss, the lovely and talented comedian who is opening for me for three nights before the end of the festival. And no one else turned up. No one at all. That was a first for me and it's very un-nerving. Jonathan, who's gigging everywhere, did a bit of his act for us (and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest) and then pottered off and I did three-quarters of an hour, just for Adam, on what it was like working at the BBC in the 1980s in radio and TV and about encounters (safe ones) with Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and their ilk, including my infamous Paul Daniels and Jeffery Archer stories which had better remain safely un-written-down. The greater the truth, and all that...

I managed to put thoughts about the zero showing away to deal with later and we had a cheery and yummy Chinese supper at Chop Chop just down the road from Ryries with pickled cucumber, beans in chilli sauce, deep fried beef, prawn dumplings, sticky chicken wings and prawn crackers and talked life, the universe and everything and how I have to get back into teaching Kabbalah and get off my backside and get out of Devon more frequently. Adam, who doesn't pull punches, said 'you are a Master Kabbalist. Start acting like it.'

That was more food in one day than I generally eat in two ... maybe three ... but bless her, my stomach manned-up and took it and only quietly explained the following morning that a little less excess would be a very good idea, thank you.