Bagpipes: MIA
It’s Ed Fest 2010, I have 90 minutes invaluable work time in which the 3Ness article urgently requires revision and 40 pages of script even more urgently require being written. Which is probably why I’m uploading very silly photos of Cec’s farewell to Facebook and writing an entirely un-urgent blog instead. Yes, I am that bad.
Here’s the view from my window in Starbucks on the Royal Mile . Yes, I’m in Edinburgh – one of the most beautiful UK cities, retaining not only its unspoilt character but also its centuries of hard accumulated dirt – in Starbucks – but I am not ashamed because there are coffee shops here with whole lists of how to behave on their premises with laptops – ie don’t bring them in and take up valuable seating space for hours on end while consuming one small latte – so there. I’m here, I have a power point (an item conspicuously missing from the hostel room) and an apparently charmingly ancient table that wobbles worse than me after half a glass of wine.
Anyway, improvements on last year’s trip include not living with a madman Braveheart impersonator plus claymore – I’m still absolutely paranoid that I’m going to run into Jon somewhere on the Royal Mile, this city surely can’t be big enough for the two of us, even during Festival – and living right under the castle. And having an iPhone so I can plan on the run and even remain more or less found (as opposed to perpetually lost) when unaccompanied by navigator/nominated adult Poppy. She’s currently in a real cafe, you know, a small family business type that probably has better coffee but would frown upon me, my Wonder Woman shirt, the unavoidable hunt for a table near a power point and the unpacking of the laptop.
Which I should put to some real use. But first, since I’m unforgiveably blogging (when I have an UNWRITTEN SCRIPT, dammit), here’s a para of Ed Fest news, starting with the strange absence of pipers on the street. Where are they all, Missing In Action? What’s the point of Edinburgh without a piper on every street corner? I started to desperately imagine that completely unrelated sounds – such as the hum of airconditioning units and squawking of over-fed over-sized over-aggressive seagulls was that very special flat sound a set of pipes makes when the piper first inflates them before defeaning everyone in a half mile radius.
Secondly, stand-up that is extremely unfunny is still extremely painful. Stand-up that is crude and unfunny is unforgiveable. Which is another way of saying that The Great Big Comedy Picnic has at least four lies in its title. Don’t go there. On the brighter side, Ad Finitum’s one-man Odyssey was a marvel of physical theatre. After two scheduling bloops and an inability to find anywhere to eat dinner in a civilised manner (ie inside, at a table), Poppy and I fortuitously bought mega hot potatoes to eat on the steps of Hunter Square, where we were accosted twice by promoters for comedy shows at the Tron. We were wary, after the horrors of the Really Bloody Awful Picnic but parting with £2:50 seemed a reasonable gamble as opposed to free comedy – and indeed Elis James’ Daytripper and Gordon Southers’ Borders restored my faith in Fringe comedy. Scarily, both had recently done the Adelaide Fringe and could not only reproduce a variety of Australian accents in chilling authenticity but make such accurate observations about our hometown that they had both Poppy and I in stitches. I have my raspy phone-sex voice back again (my speech therapist is not a fan and not amused) which means I can only laugh with a bizarre combination of high-pitch squeaks and very deep gwauffs, which is to say that my mirth was so obvious to the rest of the audience that a girl in the toilets was like ‘So, you’re from Adelaide, huh?’
Oh, you can take the girls from Adelaide, but you can’t take Adelaide out of the girls…