Tonight:
4°c
The World's Greatest Arts Festival™ began this weekend in The Athens of The North®.
I daresay you'll read those two phrases a great deal over the next month as arts journalists around the media get out their copies of the Big Book of Edinburgh Clichés.
It is a magnificent event and I truly cannot recommend highly enough that if you get the chance, you go. I'm sorry to say that I'm not going, though. It's such a shame; I've been 12 times, mostly performing one-man shows, and after that long the Fringe is something that's in your blood, like royalty or Hep C. It's difficult to know what I'm going to miss most: the crippling several-thousand-pound debt accrued by all but the most rapaciously successful of performers, the three-week-long laryngitis, the sustained assault on my self-worth from stripling bloggers and part-time reviewers, the aching kidneys, the blotchy skin or the exclusively hot dog-based diet.
If you are curious enough to wonder what this might be like but not yet soggy of brain enough to want to find out by taking your own show up there, then you can produce a similar effect by doing the following: First, attach a Post-It bearing your PIN to your cashcard and throw it out of the window, then turn your shower onto cold and sit in it fully clothed, repeatedly hitting yourself on the back of the head with something of a Le Creuset-ish weight and scrubbing at your face with Pears soap on a scabby old Brillo pad.
Finally, to replicate the sense of being out and about on the Royal Mile, invite some local stage-school children — ideally in highly theatrical Victorian-ish get-up — to accompany your shower sitting with an endless loop of horribly enthusiastic, bellowed scenes from whichever 19th-century novel their teacher has based a musical on this year, while a massive wind machine blows thousands of badly-designed leaflets at you, until you become one big papier-mâché lump, and people start mistaking you for a piece of art and come round your house to examine you ponderously, calling you “witty” and “situationist”.
There is a sort of Midas Touch effect that Edinburgh has on your memories, though. No matter the hardship — pyschological, financial or quite possibly sexual — that the Fringe doles out, it all gets deposited into the bit of the memory marked “Good Times”.
For example, the very first show I performed at Edinburgh was in a double act with my best mate Gavin, which we did in a 50-seater venue at a quarter to 10. In the morning. You read that right. That first day, fizzing, knowing this was the beginning of a glorious future, we set up our props, started up the music and, at the appointed moment, burst onto stage to find, sitting front and centre, our friend Anshuman. And absolutely no one else at all. Still did the show though (hey, eight quid's eight quid, right?) and it's one of my happiest Edinburgh memories.
Mind you, I might think differently if it happened now. Anyway, look, just go.
Thank God we're losing the Ashes
Time is a relative concept. The proof is in the fact that you ought to be reading this two days after the end of a Test match when in fact you are reading it four days afterwards. A parlous situation no doubt, much for the English cricketing world to worrit and fuss about for the next week-and-a-half.
As for me, I feel a certain sense of relief; this is the restoration of a normal state of affairs — something that I have been trained over my lifetime to deal with. I can't quite cope when we look like we're on top.
It always make me think of a line from the highly underrated film Clockwise, for which Michael Frayn wrote the script. John Cleese's character, confounded again in his attempts to get to the most important meeting of his life on time, says to his companion: “It's not the despair, Laura, I can cope with the despair — it's the hope.”
Look it's us doing the repossessing
Disturbing news about taxpayer-owned banks repossessing thousands of homes. I mean, quite apart from the obvious horror of any repossession for the people whose lives are being ruined, this can't be good for any of us.
Look, we own those banks. They're our banks. Ultimately this means that it's we who are doing the repossessing. That's going to be a little bit awkward when we're faced with old friends and colleagues who, unable to meet their debts, have been deprived of their very homes: it'll be like living in EastEnders, and nobody wants that (except maybe that bloke who plays Ian Beale, he seems to like it there).
But it's worse even than that. What if we default? We're going to end up repossessing our own homes. What are we going to do when we come round? It's not as if we can pretend not to be in — there's no way we're going to be fooled by that.
Awful. I wouldn't be able to look myself in the eye. Particularly since I would presumably have repossessed my own mirror.
Buzzwords are irritating
Actually, what am I talking about? Nobody actually says “staycation” in real life, it's only ever used by idiot columnists and feature writers roughly three times a day in every single newspaper.
It's only to be expected — they employ buzzwords as though they were the lightest nuggets of wit when, in fact, like other things that buzz — wasps, mozzies, chainsaws, contestants on Celebrity Family Fortunes — they are merely incredibly irritating. But everyone does it. Honestly, it's like buzzwords are the new black or something.
Reader views (1)
Excellent views of the Fringe. I always try to get back to Edinburgh at this time but circumstances have made me miss the experience this year. The street theatre as described is very varied, some fantastic, some rubbish, but you will always find an amazing assortment of jugglers and acrobats to entertain you in the High Street. Unfortunately Edinburgh appears to be catching up with London re price of food and alcohol and the city is in a mess this year as a tramway is under construction at the same time as major gas works across the city. No reason that inconveniences should prohibit anyone from enjoying the fun.
- Scotty, Cambridge UK, 12/08/2009 17:40
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