5. The Isle of Islay

Fresh off the ferry and after a 2 mile hike, I arrived at the distillery. I was immediately supplied with a dram of Caol Ila's finest to chase the ales I had been quaffing. I'm not a whiskey person but have to admit that those I sampled there were bloody lovely.

The next few days were uneventful, in an eventful sort of way. The highlight had to be the annual cattle market which I was fortunate enough to be on the island to experience. It was an unofficial bank holiday; the whole island stopped work and was in attendance. There was horse riding; a million litres of sun; sheep shearing; bag pipes and stalls peddling various wares. And beer. As a result I was getting pretty drunk and sunburned around midafternoon. I helped the folk of the gaelic college I had been sat with to depitch their unnecessarily massive tent. Then when everything was piled into a car there were a surplus of two of the girl's bikes, so I helpfully volunteered to ride one back to Bowmore.
I'm not sure if it was the beer, the sun, or the lack of ever having owned a woman's bike - but I was oblivious to the fact that I had left the stand down as I tried to cycle off in front pub garden filled with locals, scraping and grinding along in the gravel. I stopped wondering what the racket was. I then  attempted to raise the stand, but for some reason this a completely impossible task. Eventually some of the pub's patrons hopped over to help a poor English drunkard, who was apparently unused to their Scottish alcohol and bicycles. One of them jokingly wondered if it actually was mine to take. I finally managed to get the thing sorted and went off, the people of the pub wishing me a safe journey, with an air of genuine concern that I might kill myself.

I didn't.

Other than the cattle market, I can describe my (and probably a typical) stay on the island into a list of things I learned:

•  The locals are quite friendly. For example you wont feel like you'll be beaten up when they discover that you aren't Scottish (unlike some massive cities I might mention on the Clyde)
• It is law that you must wave to anyone you pass, be it on foot or on a bike or car *
• Being in a Hebride, Scottish Gallic is spoken by some on the island. You'll see it written here and there too like some kind of crazy spider gibberish. (Unless you speak it, that is, then presumably it will mean things)
• Locks are outlawed *
• Islay isn't pronounced "I lay" but "I luh".
• The island boasts 6 whiskey distilleries, and is known as the isle of malts.
• My sunny stay was unusual. The island normally favours lovers of the cold, the wind and the rain. Midges will abound when it's warm and the wind is low. For some reason I was immune to their attention. I will admit I found this to be a little hurtful

* This apparently isn't an actual law, but I had just assumed it was

4. Hanging in Glasgow

Deliberately didn't post yesterday, to give the illusion that I was out and about, doing cool fun things. There are two reasons that I now realise this was a stupid idea:
1. I just told you about it, making it a pretty flimsy illusion
2. It happened 3 weeks ago
Still...

Tuesday 7th August

Wow what a crazy couple of days, reader! You wouldn't believe the cool and fun things going on! It all started yesterday, when I was woken by a hostel worker who kindly advised checkout was... NOW! This was a bit earlier than I had hoped. I then realised that I had the worst hangover in the world. So I gingerly attempted to collect together my personal effects, and the inflamed fragments of my brain, and just about managed to successfully get out before anyone noticed the state of the sheets I was handing in. And, no,they weren't in a state because of that. It was... erm... food.
We passed an hour or so looking at some of the acts on the Royal Mile and Princes Street. The Fringe is a very unique festival. There there is so much going on that you will have no hope of seeing everything. Edinburgh is also an impressive city: culturally and aesthetically. I am always a little sad having to leave. But leave we did. This morning Mr. Shabadu and I would part ways. He boarded a train to Brighton and I got on a coach to spend another few days in Scotland. Before I knew it I was hanging in Glasgow! By which I mean I still had a hangover, rather than I was 'hanging out'. I thought that would be the most respectful way to arrive there.

The night before a guy from the audience of the final show in Edinburgh had asked if anyone would be in Glasgow because his band were playing. I was, I said, and agreed that I would go watch them - not really having any other plans. So in the early evening that is what I did. They were called 'The piano becomes the teeth' or something similar. They were not too bad in a sort of pretentious, "I want to kill everyone" sort of way. I would describe the style as 'post-rock'. It came complete with more energy than talent, and an incoherant vocalist. The guy from last night was one of the guitarists, and when I spoke to him briefly afterwards he found it amusing his recruiting in Edinburgh had worked.
I wish I could say Glasgow was a terrific place to be. If I had longer to absorb it a little more perhaps my mind would be changed - but unfortunately my impression was that the place was just a characterless, sprawling, concrete mess. The locals were fairly colourful, though. Later that night I was enjoying a nightcap at a bar near the hostel, when a stout woman marched in and began shrieking incoherently at the staff before sprinting out of the door for apparently no reason.

I was up early this morning* to begin the surprisingly lengthy journey to Islay, an island of the inner hebrides. As I waited for the coach a man also waiting was loudly singing along to his earphones.
".... oh yeh've gat tae search fer tha heroh insaaaeed yerseehlf ...."
It was heart warming, in a threatening sort of way. Thankfully he did not continue to sing on the coach, although it was a long ride, and by the third hour I was beginning to long for even that to entertain me. Although the scenery of the highlands and loch lomond which we passed through were stunning.
A ferry followed this.The sky had turned cloudless and azure by then, and the sun was beaming down. I decided to have an ale and sit on the the deck of the ferry for a bit. Finally we docked at Port Askaig! It consists of two and a half cottages, a pub and a dog.  The person I am meeting will be working until 5 nearby, and it is only 3pm, so I am currently sampling an ale at the pub. I will soon be bidding my farewells to the dog, and walking the couple of miles though the balmy heat and Scottish wilderness to the distillery at Caol Ila to meet my host on the island.

* In this paragraph, you may notice I draw upon my vast and daunting writing talent to shift the tense to make it seem as if the events are happening today. As you may remember this actually happened ages ago, but this way you get more enjoyment from this otherwise fairly dull post. Trust me.

3. Last full day in Edinburgh!

Monday 6th August

I was woken, strangely amused by some people in our dorm, who were clumsily gathering their things to leave. They banged their locker doors, clattered about in their bags and thudded around in boots whilst carefully whispering to each other as quietly as they could. 10 for effort.
After a few minutes laying in - I got up. Like yesterday it was too early for any fringe shows, so I decided that I should see another sight. This time I picked "Arthur's Seat" in Holyrood park. I knew the area vaguely having seen it from a distance, so I envisioned this would be a short relaxing stroll up a gentle slope. It would have been a perfect plan, but aside from the fact that it was now tipping it down with rain, the thing wasn't a slope but more like a green mountain in the middle of Edinburgh. It's actually only 250 metres up, but it had been a heavy night last night, so felt like Snowdon to me. I also accidentally took a wrong path early on. This meant that I was forced to go miles further than necessary in order to circumnavigate a seemingly endless wall of cliffs to find a route up.
Eventually, I made it! The weather was kind enough to relent at this point and there were some very nice views at the summit. In fact it became downright sunny as I made my way down an almost vertical set of stairs that I was quite glad I didn't choose to ascend.

Once back in the city centre I grabbed lunch from a trendy looking bar and then met with Mr Shabadu who had been watching the Monkey Poet. I assumed that this was a person, not an actual monkey, or I would totally have gone to that instead of hike up a ridiculous hill. That being said this year was boasting a single performance of 'A Young man dressed as a gorilla dressed as an old man sits rocking in a rocking chair for fifty six minutes and then leaves'. I was very upset that our visit did not coincide with that. Instead we saw a comedian that we had seen last year who had excellently written material called Martin Croser, in 'Stephanie Lang and Martin Croser: Greens'. It was funny, only suffering a little from nervous delivery. His cohort was evidently much less experienced but made up for it by being entertainingly cutesy.

In a gap where nothing was scheduled we bought some tickets to Loretta Maine who was good. She does this sort of thing:

Later that afternoon Mr Shabadu realised that some evening tickets he had bought for the rapper: Doc Brown were missing. For some reason so far all our tickets seemed cursed to vanish. We stopped by the venue: the underbelly. We told that we could come later and wait until everyone else was seated and then we could take any unclaimed seats if two were available. Awesome!

So we went off to do other things. At one particular show we were sat in a small circle in a damp pub cellar having a chat with a compére and a couple of comedy fans getting to know each other. It was a fairly odd excuse for a comedy gig. Apparently a number of comedians were due to perform, but an admin glitch had left the start of the show without anyone on. When the guys in the audience learned of our ticket loss they said the show was fantastic, however it wasn't the rapper: doc brown, as we had thought, but doctor Brown, a show performed largely in silence. Well as you may be aware, dear reader: silence is the absence of rapping. So it was basically the opposite of what we expected. Nevertheless, as Doctor Brown would actually be starting soon we needed to go and see if they would let us in.  We promised the show at large (all 3 of them) that we would be back afterwards. We turned up and to our joy there were two spare seats. Even better: The show was fantastic. It was silent, but a brilliant example of the level of communication and humour possible without sound. Heavy with audience participation to the point where each audience member got a hug on the way out.

We returned to the previous venue to find the compére was now struggling to engage a disinterested bunch who were drunkenly talking amongst themselves. It reminded me of a teacher vainly attempting to make an unruly class behave and pay attention. A comedian did make a brief appearance although it was possibly only us two late comers were listening. After he left the compére returned to talk to a room full of backs. He wasn't really telling any jokes, so the non-watchers drifted away. Eventually we were the only two left in the place. This was turning out to be quite absurd. I was too drunk to really care, though, so we listened to the compére explain at length how this wasn't his fault, and encouraged us to tell the pub manager what a fabulous success the show had been.

We went to round off the evening with a couple of beers from the bar. We bumped into one of the guys from earlier - Ian. He was the one who told us Doc Brown was Doctor Brown. We talked with him for a while. He was from Edinburgh so this was a regular haunt of his. Eventually Mr Shabadu went off to bed whilst I finished up. Ian suddenly asked if I had heard of a band called Idlewild. I told him I had. It was no lie, they were an old favourite of mine who I had been to see play live on more than one occasion. He announced proudly that Bob Fairfoul was at the bar. Sure enough, slumped at the bar and slurring to himself was the ex-bassist of Idlewild. I was told it was his birthday. We chatted with him for a bit as he appeared to have ended up on his own.
My memory mostly fails me from this point onwards. I suppose that is one of the dangers of trying to keep up drinking with a Scot. I have fractured images of tartan, white on blue, grey pubs and girls weeping in despair at the news that I was leaving town tomorrow. Perhaps I dreamed that last one.

2. Edinburgh Recollections. Parte: The Seconde

Sunday 5th August

I woke up absurdly late... Well: 9am; Got dressed; Cleaned the foot powder from my shoes that I must have drunkenly and liberally scattered all over the place before going to bed last night; and set of into the warm morning drizzle.

I quickly secured a takeaway coffee from a nearby café, then consulted the internet to find something to do in Edinburgh, because most of the festival stuff would not kick off until midday.
"Ocean Terminal" seemed appealing. It was apparently where the Royal yacht Britannia was currently berthed. I'm not an especially huge fan of the monarchy, really, but maybe this glorious testament to British engineering and luxury travel would change my mind! Or at least it would be something to look at. So I hopped on a likely looking bus and went. To be fair the yacht was quite interesting, although I wasn't sure if I should have been doing something so unashamedly touristy during a famous cultural festival.
Still... Only a single bed, eh Liz?

After the audio tour I decided to celebrate and have steak for breakfast at Frankie and Benny's. Despite being delicious and awesome, this luxury made me later getting back into town than I would have liked. I just about arrived in time for the "Two o'clock show", which comprised of 3 pretty good stand ups and a  compère. If my memory serves that was on at about 2 o'clock. Afterwards we decided to make our way across town to see Stewart Lee.
There was time to kill before that so we chose a nearby show at random: "Shane Brown: generation y and the doomsday whistle" which was a decent stand up set, although it was underneath a restaurant so buying 2 pints meant I had to sell a kidney in order to recoup my losses. We then made our way to be punctual at "The Stand". We quickly learned that he wasn't on there, so rushed to the right place to be marginally late. We nearly didn't have enough time to get beers, which would have been highly upsetting.

Stewart Lee was one of the few shows we were seeing that were part of the "normal" Edinburgh fringe. Ostensibly this meant it would cost more than voluntary donations, and be somewhere proper - rather than a crusty pub cellar. This place turned out to be the new "Assembly Rooms", which was a huge and impressively grand venue. A point Stewart Lee pounced on to explain a problem with the demographic this made his audience. It occurred to me I might even be a little under-dressed here, clad as I was in jeans and hiking shoes. But then I had steak for breakfast so screw them.

After this the rest of the day was spent at various free shows. Unfortunately the details about some of them has become a little obscured by time and inebriation. One I do remember well was an entirely heart warming tale about a man's love of film, and the films he and his father would watch. I do remember it well, although I forget what it was called.
Another was "PBH and some comedians XVI". This was advertised as "now being in it's 16th year so you can legally shag it". There were a number of acts from other fringe shows, and they did not disappoint despite their condensed sets. Afterward we bumped into the compère of the show: Peter Buckley Hill. He is the founder of one branch of the free fringe so talked to him about that a little bit, before staggering off to bed.

1. A Jaunt to Scotland

It's been a few weeks now, and I think that I have finally managed to recover my body and mind enough to begin piecing together what happened on the week I spent in Scotland... So I decided to add the posts day by day. As if it is happening now! Except it isn't, or course. This is merely an attempt to document what happened before it becomes lost in the murk of my poor memory...

Saturday the 4th of August:

Woke up at the delightfully unpalatable hour of 5am to catch the train to Edinburgh for the Edinburgh festival. My friend: Mr Shabadu was travelling up too, we had gone to the festival last year as well so were continuing the tradition. We met at Brighton station, grunted grouchily at each other and  began our journey. I remember wanting to sleep, but couldn't as the olympic games were on in London that week the train became steadily more packed. Early morning at Victoria station was busy enough to seem like it was rush hour. Once we got to the underground barrier I discovered to my annoyance and utter despair that my ticket to Edinburgh was not on me! The next 20 minutes were spent retracing my steps to find it; searching; asking the guard at the ticket barriers if it had been handed in; looking around some more. To no avail. I eventually realised the only option was to see if someone at the ticket desk could reprint my pre-booked tickets, or just buy another one. We were rapidly running out of time to catch our train. The woman at the ticket office advised me to just get on the train, and there is a chance the staff will understand, take pity on a moron - and issue me a replacement. However when we got back to the underground station I find the train ticket on the floor, in the exact same spot where I first realised it was missing (The one place I didn't think to check - but should have). So the next 20 minutes were spent running down escalators, tube platforms and the seemingly endless tunnel that connects kings cross rail and tube stations to try and get there on time. We were literally 2 seconds late. The open button on the train doors failed to respond to our urgent pressing and the train eventually chugged ponderously out of our grasp. We shrugged, regained our breath and agreed that I was an oaf, and that there was definitely no way that it was our fault because we were there on time. Even though we really weren't. We could think of excuses though, right?

After a lengthy but uneventful journey on the next train we arrived at Edinburgh Waverly station. It was around 1 in the afternoon so despite the unnecessary stress in London we had made good time. As we walked up the ramp to exit the station I could not help but feel like it had not been a year since we were last there. Mr Shabadu agreed when I mentioned this. He said that although it had been a year, it felt more like 11 months.
First order of business was to get to the hostel. They were far better digs than the ones we had last year, mostly because it didn't resemble a hovel in the third world, and our room didn't back on to a busy late night music venue. However finding our room in the maze-like warren of corridors was a challenge that had us looking like cretins to some of the staff as we aimlessly roamed about the place. During check-in we learned that a nearby hostel had suddenly closed without bothering to notify any guests, So droves of visitors were turning up in the city to discover they had no accommodation in the middle of the festival. One such unlucky man was at the reception of our hostel (which was fully booked). The guy spoke very little English and a girl at the desk was trying to offer some nearby alternatives for him and his family to try; although in reality next to nowhere would have vacancies, and so I felt sorry for him.

Once we had settled in we struck out into town to find some lunch, and consider what to do. We sat in a café and pored over some guide booklets we had managed to scrounge. We decided to meet a couple who we knew and were in Edinburgh, then go and see a show containing another Brightonion friend. His show was called 'Aaaand Now For Something Completely Improvised'. It was very entertaining and the place was packed out. During the show I was prompted for a location for some scenes to take place in, and gave giza in Cairo as a suggestion. I later learned this location was given so much for the show that they were thinking about banning it! So my ability to be spontaneous is evidently terrible. Following this we made our way to the pleasance courtyard where Tom Stade would be on. We saw him last year so knew it would be good. We picked up (apparently) the last two tickets available from the ticket office, grabbed a couple of beers and soaked up some of the atmosphere. The show was great, and afterwards as Tom left the venue we saw him and we got him to write on a piece of paper.

Following this we decided to revisit another thing we enjoyed from last year called "As narrated by" which consists of a late night screening of a bad film with a narrator taking the piss out of it (a-la MST3K), whilst periodically feeding the audience shots. It was around 9pm, though, and that show started at 12 so we decided to take a chance on whatever thing happened to be on in the same venue at the time. Whilst standing outside a guy said I should see his show. So we did. it was called "Jack Heal's murderthon" and was possibly the best free show I saw this year. It was interesting, had tasteful dramatic elements and was pretty funny too.
Eventually midnight came, so we saw out the rest of the night laughing at the film Commando and guzzling free shots of Jager.