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.
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