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A little less than a century ago, the Australians realised they didn’t have a proper country and decided to set up a centralised government.

Both Sydney and Melbourne wanted to be the capital city. Which is fair enough; either would have made an obvious choice, and although I’m pretty sure Sydney had the more legitimate claim (even before the opera house was built), Melbourne has been mentioned more in Neighbours.

Instead of drawing the names out of a hat, however, or just pragmatically making the obvious decision (as I did in the above paragraph), the Australians decided to build a completely new capital city and avoid argument.

Which is why the capital city of Australia, the sterile area known as Canberra, basically resembles what Milton Keynes would look like if it had a lot more open spaces. And believe me, the open spaces are a bad thing – they mean that if you want to pop over to the corner shop for some milk it takes you the best part of the morning.

Alastair compares the scenario to two children arguing over a bag of sweets, and having the sweets taken from them altogether and thrown into a toilet.

Except that I can’t help feeling the Australians would put a positive spin on this – “oh yeah mate,” they’d enthusiastically say, “now that those sweets are in the dunny, everyone can have one!”

Because they take this attitude towards everything. Take, for example, the Ashes. We won the Ashes last year, we currently hold them, we are the ones who should be gloating. But every time the subject is broached, some Australian will chuckle with genuine pleasure and quip “yeah, don’t be too sorry when we win the Ashes back later this year, mate!”

They’re right, of course, that they will win the Ashes back later this year. But that’s not the point. Somehow they’ve taken our victory – our one victory in however many decades it has been – and turned it against us.

And being English, we all just laugh nervously and say, “oh…you!”

Instead of which we ought to be responding, “at least our captial city doesn’t look like Milton Keynes.”

But I doubt they’d get the reference.

Somebody told me today that women can wee twice as fast as men. She had statistics to prove it and everything, which maybe made her sound very knowledgeable on the topic, but didn’t quite convince me. I mean, it doesn’t sound that likely, does it? I wonder if perhaps the statistics have been skewed by the fact that women only have half the distance to cover.

What we need is actual physical evidence. It would probably require a man and a woman in controlled circumstances, who would be given the same amount of fluids and forced to urinate at the same regular intervals, then after about a week we could watch them wee.

There would also have to be a control who wouldn’t be allowed to wee at all.

On a different subject altogether, I patted a koala in Steve Irwin’s zoo and two days later he was dead. I can’t help feeling slightly responsible.

The impression I get from the news is that the world is in mourning, whereas the atmosphere here in Australia is one of quiet rejoicing.

On Thursday I went to a prom, which The Telegraph was good enough to review so I don’t have to. I’ve never been a huge fan of Mozart in the way my mother is, but then again there’s no Mozart I can think of that I won’t quite happily listen to. Except for that performance, which I unhappily listened to, trying to figure out why the pianist was being paid.

The Bruckner was, well, Bruckner. What do you expect? The man was clearly deranged.

– Edinburgh for pies, Australia for swimming. Not the other way round.

– Drink Singapore Sling in Raffles, not on the plane.

– Poseidon is a crappy film, but will scare the shit out of you on a turbulant flight.

Sorry, I’ve been very quiet on the internet recently. If you’re wondering why, the New York Times has all the answers.

I am very tired. But I think it’s been worth it – aside from impressing American reporters (and a few British ones too) I have seen the following memorable sights:

– Norman Pace picking his nose with my flyer.

– Jimmy Carr in a bright pink t-shirt, as if to say “look at me! I’m Jimmy Carr, in a bright pink t-shirt!” (the words “walking target” spring to mind).

– Sue Perkins. Who proved quite how wonderful she is when she recognised me from our brief radio interview, chatted to me about the agonies of being a solo Fringe performer, and offered me free tickets to her show. Which was bloody brilliant. (Lucy Porter’s was not.)

– The Dresden Dolls, very very close up in the Spiegeltent. They’re still fantastic.

– Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; overlong, underwritten, completely lacking in wit and devoid of any of the qualities of the first film. One star.

In amongst generally useful advice, mini flashbacks to Buffy episodes, and what she had to lunch, you get occasional gems. Half way through reading her post on refreshing joke forms, I honestly thought I wouldn’t laugh at any of the jokes. They were all so old, or somewhat clunky.

And then she pulled out the last one, and I’m sorry, I laughed out loud. People around me are looking askance (but not very askance; they know me quite well). There’s something very carefully played about the last line, which makes it funnier than the joke itself deserves. Great.

I hope that some of what I write induces similar reactions. The best I’ve come so far to myself was in naming a character in my film Sheffield, on a whim, and then discovering a whole vein of Sheffield jokes that I’d never have thought of otherwise. But maybe that one’s just me.

I accidentally freaked out a co-worker today by, in the middle of a rather complicated discussion about why one of our friends shouldn’t try to date teenagers, saying “good evening sports racers, today is scratch the side of the face off a girl you like day”.

Not enough people watch Ze Frank.

I’m not sure which I’m more angry about: that spammers have found a way round my spam filter, or that the way round is to use chunks of Dan Brown writing. I have now read more Dan Brown accidentally than I managed even while deliberately reading The Da Vinci Code in a moment of stupidity (in my defense, I did skip to the next page whenever I got too annoyed with his poor characterisation, shoddy grasp of mathematics, history and geography, or mutilation of the English language; I think I completed two pages).

I now need to write a bad writing filter.

Blonde at the station
Begging for tigers’ winter.
Has night framed her day?

Somebody came up to me in the Fringe performer’s area today and said “it’s James, isn’t it?”

I recalled being flyered by him about a week and a half ago and having a brief discussion about nipples, but I didn’t think I’d given him my name. “Yes,” I replied, rather uncertainly.

“I thought so,” he beamed. “I’m reading your book!”

“Really?” I said, astonished.

“Yes, I’m really enjoying it!” (He actually did say that.) “Our producer bought it because she hadn’t done Edinburgh before, and – well – I recognised you!”

I knew it was a good idea to fill the book with pictures of myself.