JOKE'S ON US OVER SCOTTISH ATTITUDE TO ALCOHOL

THE British Medical Association (BMA) conference last week highlighted the problems of alcohol in Scotland.

Booze kills six people a day in Scotland and there is a marked increase in young people presenting alcohol problems in hospitals.

One of the initiatives the BMA came up with is to curb alcohol advertising targeted towards young people at sporting and entertainment events.

At almost every Edinburgh Fringe comedy show I have done, we had to have some booze company's logo on the poster because they sponsored the venue. That often annoyed me as I don't drink.

It seems drinks companies think comedy and being drunk go hand in hand when, in fact, they don't. Quite the opposite, as drunken people don't make great audience members.

But alcohol does seem to define our Scottish national identity.

For years, the UK has tried to persuade people to stop the bingeing. It hasn't worked. When the licensing laws altered and people could drink 24 hours a day, that didn't change anything.

Anyone who has to walk through any city centre on a Saturday night will testify to the carnage they witness. Young people screaming drunk, fighters, biters, fallers and the police on constant alert.

If you look at our European cousins, they don't have the same booze problems. People in that café culture can go out, have a few glasses of wine with their family and get home safely. I never saw Scots/UK-style drunkenness once in Barcelona when I was gigging out there last year. The late-night revellers were mostly under control and able to walk without throwing kebabs, screaming football songs or peeing into phone boxes.

There has to be a reason why Europeans can control their intake and we can't. The main problem we have is we don't raise our children to respect alcohol.

People in the UK slap the back of a drunk and laugh at his/her antics. I meet people who say they "never trust anyone who never gets drunk". What does that say about us?

In the comedy industry, if you go backstage and try to get a diet soda before show time, it's laughable. I can have as much free beer as I want, but getting a soft drink is like trying to locate Lord Lucan and you feel like an inconvenient bitch who demands white puppies in her dressing room.

I learned about drink the hard way when I got incredibly drunk one night in September 1977. I had to be carried home. I was only 16 at the time and my mammy was so disgusted at me she beat me about my head as I managed to vomit up at least six pints of fluid. The sickness lasted three days and from that day, I have never been drunk.

My daughter, Ashley, was brought up in the bar my husband and I ran, so she watched people overdo the boozing and she doesn't drink to excess. Yet she also had her own private hell of sickness when she was 18. Too much vodka in her gut and she managed to vomit in the street on a hill and it ran back towards her and landed on her good coat.

She now knows (a) don't drink too much on a night out and (b) never try to throw up on a hill when you are on the down slope.

I still get peer pressure to drink and I'm 46!

People just don't seem to accept that I can stand in a bar, go onstage and have a good night out without five bottles of lager.

"What is wrong with you? You are Scottish. For goodness sake have a drink!" they bark into my face. I am fed up justifying it, I have to stand there and tell them how I get sick if I drink too much and people stare at me as if I have a personality disorder.

The Scots have a reputation for being hard drinkers and this isn't something we should be proud of.

I hate to hear some comic stand on stage and impersonate a Scot by staggering about and slurring their speech. It's a weak, lazy stereotype that will never go away unless we change our drinking habits. There are no quick answers to the problems we have with in Scotland, nor in the UK as a whole, but accepting people don't need to drink and educating younger people that they can moderate their intake is a good first step forward.

HOW GLASGOW CAN LEAVE ME BREATHLESS

YESTERDAY, the smoking ban finally arrived in England, with cleaner air being anticipated all round. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work like that.

Central Glasgow has been reported recently as having the highest levels of air pollution in the UK outside London.

Nothing to do with the increasing amount of smokers that huddle outside and probably nowt to do with the escalating amount of outdoor gas heaters that burn off fuel outside many bars to accommodate the puffers?

And last month, the amount of dust made me choke standing in Buchanan Street. Maybe an entrepreneur will come up with a glass oxygen box where we can buy clean air and finally get a decent breath in Glasgow?

ARE THE YOUNG BECOMING INURED TO TERROR?

I WAS in Leeds on Saturday doing comedy and my daughter called late afternoon to tell me all was well at home.

The call was interrupted, she put on me on call waiting and then came back on the line to say her pal just called from Glasgow Airport where she works and told her: "Ashley, I will be late getting to you as some Asian men have just rammed a Cherokee Jeep into the airport and then ran out and poured petrol to make the fire bigger and one man is running around with his hair on fire. I will talk later."

I was stunned.

Ashley calmly told me her party plans might have been disrupted, yet she didn't even sound faintly worried. Neither did her friend.

It made me wonder if our younger generation are so used to watching major towns being attacked that even when it lands on their own doorstep, they take it in their stride.

Is that a good thing?

I don't know.

WAR AND 'PEACE'

I FIND it hard to swallow that Tony Blair is to become a "peace envoy".

This is the same bloke who dragged the UK into a horrible dirty war in Iraq and to have the word "peace" in his job title makes me feel incredibly sick.

The irony would be almost laughable, if it wasn't so bloody unpalatable.

For a man who brings peace to the table, his involvement in pouring millions of our taxpayers' cash into the Trident missiles is quite a conundrum.

It's like saying Kate Moss is to become "drugs counsellor" and Victoria Beckham has taken up the role of "healthy eating ambassador".

I like to call Mr Blair "The man who pretended he wasn't Scottish and smiled through his lies".

Meanwhile, I am off to work in my new role as "best sperm donor of the year".

Titles can be confusing, can't they?