Best of the Edinburgh Blogs – Week Four
The Edinburgh Fringe may be over for another year and performers may be limping home nursing the “fringe flu”, but our bloggers have valiantly persevered to provide us with a few final glimpses of what the Fringe has to offer before retiring for a well deserved rest.
Christopher Dingli is perplexed by a mystery glass but discovers the joys of house sharing, while John Fleming’s search for the next winner of the Malcolm Hardee Award takes a suprising turn. As fatigue and hard partying take their toll, Alison Goldie realises that she may have slightly overdone it this year and Jeff Turner is unexpectedly longing for a return to healthy living. Pete Sorel-Cameron, on the other hand, recommends that festival-goers embrace the hedonistic spirit of the Festival, even if it does result in a nasty bout of the Fringe Pox.
“It all began with a glass. An ordinary glass, of the type that you would find in any kitchen in any ordinary home. Except that the problem was that this glass wasn’t in the kitchen. It was in the loo … And there it has remained all throughout the festival, on the shelf in our loo, always empty, never wet or anything. Occasionally someone will move it to the other end of the shelf, but it’s always on the shelf, never anywhere else. Always there, until today … Today, one of my housemates entered the kitchen triumphantly holding the glass proclaiming that she couldn’t take it any longer and that the glass must be removed from the loo … Nobody would own up to putting the glass in the loo! It didn’t belong to anybody. Eventually, after much discussion (paranormal activity?) and accusations (where were you on the night of the 7th?) we agreed that it must have belonged to a previous housemate who has since left Edinburgh … One would think that four weeks into the fringe, we’d be at each others’ necks by now. But we’re not…unless someone puts another glass in the loo.”
“The Malcolm Hardee Awards … were thrown into temporary and rather surprised confusion after a rebuff to our nomination of American stand-up Bo Burnham for the Malcolm Hardee ‘Act Most Likely to Make a Million Quid’ Award … Burnham’s London PR company – whose clients include a wealth management and an insurance broking, risk assessment and financial services company – wrote to me saying of Bo: ‘making money is not what he’s driven by at all and (we) don’t think he’d be at all comfortable with receiving this award’ … As a result, the five Malcolm Hardee judges have now additionally nominated Bo Burnham for the main Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality because ‘for a modern day stand-up comic not to be interested in money is entirely original’.”
“Waaaaaah! It’s all over for me. Done and dusted. Je ne regrette rien, I did it my way, there’s no business like showbusiness. The fat lady sang, I walked the line, I’m not looking back. I came, I saw, I conquered … I’m spent now. Home beckons. If you want me in the next week or so, I shall be lying down. Thanks to whatsonstage.com for letting me write these blogs. Enjoyed writing them (a lot). No more…body in meltdown…head fuzzy…let me g…… (Alison Goldie was pronounced DOA at Kings Cross Station. Whilst checking her over, the words ‘break a leg’ were uttered and she suddenly revived and demanded that we powder her nose as she had a show to do, no matter how small the audience…Ambulance Crew)”
“So, we are now entering the final week of the Festival for this year, and Edinburgh is taking its toll. Everyone is slowly morphing. We are all looking less and less like our own flyers indicate. Ahh, those fresh-faced photographs, taken all those weeks ago, when we still had some vegetables in our systems … The Edinburgh lifestyle effects every participant in different ways, but rest assured, it definitely effects us all! Dan, my ‘Potted partner’, as it were, comes into his own. His body clock instantly adjusts into that of a mouse, and he spends his nights scurrying from place to place, mingling and raising a glass of milk with all the other nocturnal creatures … I, on the other hand, tend not to slip so easily into the Edinburgh time-zone, and I evolve more into a sloth, spending my evenings sloping from courtyard to dome to takeaway to bed … So, as much as I adore the Festival, now the final week is upon us, I find I am looking forward to heading back to London, as I’ve started craving things I never thought I would, such as salad, tennis, fruit juices and jogging. And that just isn’t healthy.”
“Like a fool, I used to claim I never got ill. And like the foolish friend of mine who arrived on the beach one day proclaiming ‘I never get sunburnt’, I have been proved quite painfully wrong … I realise the festival is nearly over now, so any tips are pretty much useless, but I thought I could share my efforts with the blog reading community, perhaps in an effort to start a debate about how best to deal with the Fringe Pox. I have been on a course of the highly recommended and reassuringly expensive Manuka honey. It costs upwards of £10 a jar, which if nothing else allows you to feel like your cold cure is keeping up with Edinburgh spirit of spending money you are barely earning. I have gargled with Lemsip. Delicious, but painful if attempted too soon after boiling the kettle. And I have refrained from going out and getting drunk every night in a noisy bar … Actually, having said all that, I am now reminded that I did, in fact, get ill. So instead, my advice would be to go out till the wee small hours every night, have a few drinks, scream at people in Brooke’s Bar and eat KFC all August. Enjoy yourself, because no amount of power smoothies can save you from the pox.”
– Catherine Love
