Fringe

So I'm back from four days at the Edinburgh Festival, four days older, about £300 poorer (most likely much more but I can't bear to look) and approximately four stone heavier. We ate and drank like fat monarchs and then burned off around 0.4% of it charging up and down the Scottish capital's not-insignificant slopes from one venue to the next. Organising a trip to the festival is not for anyone who struggles to schedule a doctor's appointment. The book of options is as thick as Edinburgh's phone book, stuffed with details about the shows, plays, comedians and musicians that are performing for our applause. As an example, the Udderbelly is one of the larger companies at the Festival, with stages in (I think) three or four different parts of the city that range from the huge McEwan hall (where the university students go to graduate) to tiny rooms for one-man plays that seat only 30 audience members - and they had over 120 different shows playing each and every single day of the three week festival. Then there's the Pleasance, Assembly, the Caves, and countless less official rooms-above-pubs where there are shows that range in price from 'We'll pay you to come' to £20 a ticket. So you work out what you want to see, when it's on, how much it costs, where it is, how long it will take you to get from that venue to the next, whether you've got time to meet someone for a drink or lunch in between, whether you'll manage to stay awake given that you stayed out dancing until the wee hours at Silent Disco or similar, whether your feet will freeze off given that it was baking hot when you left your hotel at 11am and now it's arctic and you can't wear tights with flip-flops without looking like a retard.

It was an experience. Last time I went to the festival was in 1993 - I went with a group from school in preparation for our Theatre Studies A Level course, which I then abandoned after a few weeks. My memories of the festival are: falling asleep in an eternal and appalling Shakespeare production, freezing my 15-year-old ass off up at the castle ruins for a midnight performance of Clytemnaestra's Bairns and calling up our Deputy Headmistress from the payphones in the Waverley shopping centre to receive our GCSE results. This time I had no exams to worry about, just a rapidly diminishing bank balance and a rapidly expanding thigh girth and that omnipresent festival sensation that you can't do everything, which I'm really getting quite adept at handling.

We did do a fair bit, though - the geeksheet above should give you a flavour although it did not remain accurate due to some last minute shifts. We also, despite being as organised as I'd thought it was possible for a human to be, managed to arrive smugly at the wrong venue well over 50% of the time, leading to irritating middle class dashes across the city as we flapped late into plays about teenage gangs, the fallout from Guantanamo detention centre, the sex trade in London, Georgian refugees, or an uplifting performance by the exceptional Soweto Gospel Choir. Late night comedy was probably my favourite bit, Terry Alderton causing me to laugh so long and hard that by half-way through I was wondering if I actually had the energy to go on, half-lying on my chair, weakly convulsing with mascara tears streaming. There were certainly negatives too but I loved the sensation of my critical faculties becoming honed as I saw more and more - so even when I could pick up a flaw, it brought me satisfaction. Certainly I've realised that plays need to say more than 'Slavery is awful' or 'Being a refugee sucks' - the play we saw about women hired as sex slaves in London detailed two tragic stories but didn't tell us anything new, while the play about torture in Guantanamo was spoiled by being too far-fetched - the final oh-so-predictable twist was totally unnecessary and, in fact, the play would have been far more interesting without it. Still, though, in every case I was glad to have attended.

Not sure Em felt the same about our comedy show on Saturday night - Australian Jim Jeffries who swore with evident pleasure, daring us to squirm, laid into women (especially lesbians) in pretty disgusting style, and whose graphic accounts of sexual antics had me wincing. There was irony in his performance, though - an underlying sense of 'I know this is shocking' - an irony that was absolutely missed by the 15 drunk Scotsmen in the row behind us, who yelled 'Hibs - CUNTS' all the way through; burped loudly, pungently and frequently; and who used Jeffries' jokes as vindication for their own revolting views. There were more mysogenistic, anti-Semitic and xenophobic comments coming from the guys 30 centimetres behind me than there were from the comic onstage - and eventually their lewd behaviour started bothering Jeffries, who called the show to a halt and asked for the guys to leave. Security filed up the aisles but the men refused to move, and we later found out that unless the guys had been physically violent or threatening, the guards couldn't lay a finger on them. In the end, a guard sat down next to them, which was basically as effective as saying 'Ah, ok lads, as you were' and indeed, they did carry on chatting and shouting for the rest of the gig. Not pleasant, but certainly an experience.

Worst show for me was probably Flawless, now known as Flawed, who are undeniably talented dancers - but their stage management was about as complex and well-orchestrated as our dorm plays were when I was a 12 year old boarding school girl. Achingly long gaps between numbers, unclear song-endings, bad props - this an act who (I believe) came second in Britain's Got Talent - and their performance was put to shame by the Soweto Gospel Choir and the Cambridge University Footlights, both groups who know how to run a show. Flawed weren't helped, however, by one of their video clips showing a dancer as saying that this was an exciting time for young people, "what with role models like Obama and Susan Boyle." I blast-laughed loudly and alone, remembering quickly that we were not at a comedy show.

Got to go to be therapised. Festival summary: very fun, very expensive, very white, very privileged, bit guilt-making, not as emotionally affecting as Glastonbury but recommended nonetheless.