My first ever trip to the Edinburgh Fringe did not start well. “Major disruption is expected until at least 12.00”, the message read when I checked my Trainline app before I’d even set off. A sea of red: delayed, delayed, delayed.
Fine, I thought grimly. I’ll go to King’s Cross anyway. It’s not like I’ve paid £172 for my ticket, or anything…
That’s right: for the same price as a flight, I was heading up to the Fringe for the very first time — I just had to find some way to get there. But with so many trains cancelled on a Friday morning before one of the key weekends in the creative calendar (the second in August), things were not looking good.
Not least when you consider that when I did eventually arrive and went straight to where I was staying, it was an immediate throwback to the bad parts of the late 1990s (by which I mean the days when we used to go on a group shop to Big Tesco at three in the morning to stock up on 17p loaves of bread, cut-price potatoes and crates of Hooch that had gone off the week before). Yes — I’d paid £366 for the dubious privilege of two nights in student digs: the only option available for bad ADHD planners like me, who had left it so late to decide to come. The options were the student accommodation (a single bed in a private room with a shared bathroom), or a cubby hole in a dorm room for 24. In the latter, there were no locks on the door, because there were… no doors. Just a curtain separating your twin bed in a ‘pod’ from your neighbour (a total stranger).
Something weird must have happened to me, though (I think it’s called ‘being skint’) because I did, actually, book that dorm originally after having a mad moment of forgetting I’m a 44-year-old mother-of-two and fancying myself 18 again and in Australia on a ‘gap yah’. What in the name of ‘carve myself a didgeridoo’ was I thinking?
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Still, the gods of basic human sense came to my rescue (sort of): the £222 I’d paid to secure my dorm ‘pod’ had sold out by the time it came for me to put in my payment details.
God, how I craved a hotel. But a hotel in Edinburgh in August for two nights was well over £1,000. It wasn’t going to happen.
Student digs might not be so bad, I reasoned… but then I got there.
And my god, I’d forgotten the smell. That unique odour, the pervasive scent of teenage boy; of unwashed socks and unaired rooms and mould and badly ventilated showers and blocked toilets with suspiciously wet floors and basement flats without windows and “I didn’t know you had to actually clean the carpet”. Someone had left unidentifiable bits of skin in the sink. Someone else found it totally acceptable to come in at 4.30am the first night; to shout loudly to their friends in the corridor, and to then go to bed, but not before slamming all the fire doors. Had Sartre also stayed in Destiny Student, Meadow Court, House 13, Flat 1 when he wrote “Hell is other people” in his seminal work, No Exit? Because after trying to get to sleep with someone buzzing the front doorbell every five minutes from two in the morning, I think I finally understand existentialism.
Not wishing to spend more than a minute longer inside my damp cell than I had to, I launched myself at the Fringe — the only trouble was, Oasis were playing in Edinburgh that weekend.
Which makes the words of one Scottish man who barraged past my friend while she was sobbing on a side street after a particularly emotional play even more pertinent — “Locals need to get past too, you know”. And, look, I get it. I hated English people being in Edinburgh as much as any local — and I was one of the main offenders.
Unsightly swarms of summer tourists descending on the city in droves not only drives up the prices for everybody (I saw one set lunch menu change before my very eyes from £12 per person to £20, when the manager realised he’d given out the wrong one) but it makes walking in the street — the simplest of acts, the only one that doesn’t cost a fortune — unbearable, if not downright impossible.
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After getting off my train when I arrived, I had precisely 15 minutes to navigate my way to my friends, who were queuing at the Pleasance Courtyard to see Fuselage, Annie Lareau’s emotionally devastating play about losing her friends in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie. I should have been able to make it — except for the foot traffic. Swarms of suitcases weaved aggravatingly slowly through the cobbled streets like a funeral procession of tiny pink woodlice with “I heart London” stickers on their backs. Tour guides stopped every few steps to point out something to do with Harry Potter or haggis.
The Royal Mile felt like a gladiatorial arena, where you’re running the gauntlet of desperate comedians handing out flyers, beat boxers spitting into microphones and gratingly cheerful acapella groups (not now, Susan). All around us: buses dropping off more bodies — more, more, more — to shop for woolly bobble hats and tartan trousers at Pride of Scotland, ubiquitous £3.50 pizza slices on every corner, coffee for £4.20 a pop, cashmere scarves.
It was like Oxford Street, which no Londoner with any sense at all would do anything but avoid.
It’s lucky, then, that the Fringe was so good. It really was. I mean: it was also hit and miss (on my first night I found myself at a cabaret show at The Three Sisters, with such sad and lackluster burlesque it felt as though it was a Christmas Day episode of EastEnders; as if the local WI had decided to do a half hour ‘introduction to stripping’ session and then “let the girls have a go on stage”) but some of it was incredible. Fuselage was incredible. Margaret Curry in Lanford Wilson’s Who We Become: incredible. Kieran Hodgson’s biting Voice of America: incredible. The surreal and ridiculous (and Sartre would’ve dug it) 3 Chickens Confront Existence: incredible. The authors Emma Forrest and Emma Jane Unsworth, who I caught as part of the opening day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival: incredible. The events and art at the Summerhall: incredible. The Japanese omelette pancake cooked freshly at a tiny stand at the corner of Sciennes: incredible.
But the accommodation, prices and number of people? Not even Sartre would have a phrase for that.
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