John Gibson: Don’t try this at the Usher Hall

He has to be joking, of course. The most outrageous, unspeakable, toffee-nosed snob on these islands. He can well afford to be with his untold millions.

We can only be gossiping about Michael Winner. Who else? Some might allege that he’s ageing disgracefully and he’ll wallow in that.

Apparently Sir Michael (sir, if you please) kicked up a bit of a stooshie the other night, insisting that he and his beloved Geraldine had their photo taken in the main auditorium of the Royal Opera House, in mid-performance.

He’d never get away with that in the Usher Hall. Certainly not during a Chris Rea gig.

Weight and see

A weighty problem. There are a lot them about in Edinburgh. Obese mothers. Swilling, straight from the bottle, fizzy drinks (some of it dribbling onto their mobile phones, offspring silenced in their prams with crisps).

A study of a thousand children between two and five found that if their mothers were obese they were twice as likely to have children with autism or other developmental problems. Autism affects one child in a hundred in the UK.

Obesity, it’s plain to see, stalks the streets of Edinburgh but too many mums-to-be don’t appear to be in the least concerned.

Research at the University of California, a long way away, so why worry? A random item from the trust-me-I’m-not-a-doctor casebook.

Afterwords . .

. . it was, much to our surprise, the perceptive Mae West, who utttered: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”