Fringe benefits

Living in Scotland has certain drawbacks - the mediocre weather, the ever present threat posed by Bucky swilling neds and so on... - but luckily it does mean that we are close to one of Britain's most exciting events: the Edinburgh Festival. Technically that should really be the Edinburgh Festivals as there are several running concurrently, but for simplicity's sake we'll stick with the singular.

[Please note, these are not my videos, just embedded ones from www.youtube.com]



Anyway, this year we managed to earmark a couple of weekends to make the quick trip down to ol' Reekie to try to catch the odd show or seven (the odder the better usually), eat our bodyweight in curry and soak up a bit of the atmosphere.

Leaving immediately after work (Tracy's work that is - I'm still on holiday heh heh heh) we jumped on a train and got in to Edinburgh by about 7pm. We checked in to the hostel and immediately set out in search of Jason Byrne's venue. As we passed several venues we remarked upon the length of the queues before arriving at our desination - only to find we'd just walked past it, had remarked upon the length of the queue, and we now had to climb the hilll we'd just decended. Isn't it ironic. Don't you think? Anyway, despite the fact we were right up the back with a restricted view, we still enjoyed the show and had a good time nevertheless. That night we stopped by Ann Purna for dinner and had some lovely curry and beer (well, I had some lovely beer anyway :D).


[Kevin Eldon is the chap with the dark hair on the right]

Saturday we managed to see Kevin Eldon, David Strassman and Mark Watson (individually, not concurrently) with Kevin's solo show being a particular highlight. Saturday also saw more curry, coffee, bagel, guinness and (if memory serves) more beer.



Sunday we had free, so spent the day wandering about and soaking up the festival atmosphere. Sunday was sadly lacking in curry, but we hope to make up for that next time we visit the capital in a fortnight's time.