Morgan & West: Finding Your Fringe Friends

So we are nine days in to the festival, and it is beginning to feel like we never left. In fact, given that we’ve got another seventeen shows to go, it also feels like it’ll never end. Routines have settled in, and we’re starting to pick up our first Fringe-Friends.

What on earth is a Fringe-Friend I hear you ask. Ok, I don’t hear it per-se, but I like to imagine I can hear it. Fringe-Friends are the people you see every day, day in day out, because their personal routines happen to coincide with yours for part of the day. You may only share a few words and token glances with them a day, you may never discuss anything that isn’t your shows and the perils of flyering, you may never learn their name and instead refer to them as “Tall Guy from the cast of that sketch show”, but all the same they are friends

Fringe-Friends are comrades in arms, sharing the thrills and spills of the festival, each struggling to make their mark on the fringe, and offering words of comfort to those struggling alongside them.

So next time you’re bounding up and down the mile giving cardboard to strangers, spare a thought for the Fringe-Friends you probably didn’t even know you had. Say hello, ask how it’s going, and try and sneakily work out what “Tall Guy from the cast of that sketch show” is actually called…