Okay, so the plan is to keep a daily online journal to chronicle my first adventures as a performer at the biggest arts festival in the world. Usually I’m too lazy to keep these things up, but poverty and lack of nearby friends would suggest this might not be the case this time. I’ll try my best and we’ll see what happens – which is the same that can be said for my show.
I have this cocktail of emotion coursing through me of fear and excitement, frightful trepidation and eager anticipation. You’d think the opposite feelings would lead to an external appearance of emotional neutrality similar to that of the Evesham audience at one of my previews but you would be wrong. The unknown is what powers me but it will soon become a reality. The search then starts for a new source of energy to keep my spirits up and running. In just over twenty four hours of writing this I’ll be onstage and reciting my routine to an audience entirely made of strangers.
The journey up was fairly uneventful. The weather was as erratic as you’d expect venturing to Scotland in the summer. A couple of funny coincidences made an appearance that others might take as signs – not my own cynical self, of course – Pulp’s Common People came on the radio which was what led me to buy the album Different Class when I was twelve and informs a routine on the show. Even funnier a car driving in front of us on the M1 had ‘ECW’ as it’s last Upon arrival at around six I came up to the reception expecting that my long-term stay and three-year loyalty would reward me with a tent right next to the entrance allowing quick. Apparently what it actually results in is being parked so far up the site that it is not covered by the large map handed to all customers and has to be pointed out on a smaller attached map that they don’t even bother printing on nice thick yellow paper.
The tent pitching was a headache but not as soul-destroying as it could have been to start my three-and-a-half week stay. The blind-leading-the-blind setup that was me managing the situation with my mom offering moral support finally meant that the tent was up after about an hour. Unfortunately it was setup on a little slope instead of flat land which I imagine will lead to unusual dreams involving the thing Goldfinger holds James Bond as a laser slowly approaches him to chop his bollocks in half. Man, talk about taking out an adversary’s best weapon. I guess in my dreams the laser will be aimed towards my oversized calves. This morning my mom popped into the tent before she left for Birmingham and inflated my mattress. I now have so much stuff in my tent that there is literally nowhere to move. I can merely crawl in, lie on the mattress and try my best to navigate around on my front or back to get what I need before clambering out the tent every morning like the largest, hairiest baby born outside of Wolverhampton.
Walking for a while with my mom through Edinburgh was fun. She was amazed at the sheer length of the place – and that was really only based on walking around the Princes Street area since it was too late and we were too knackered to go over the North Bridge and walk through the Royal Mile and beyond. It is true you sometimes forget just how vast the place is. It even deceives the eye when you’re walking. You can start a traipse down one of the main roads thinking it will take only a few minutes only for this endless horizon to mean it takes the best part of a quarter-of-an-hour. I think if I need to start getting around places fast I need to learn the bus routes.
So that was day #0. Stay tuned for full report of my first full day at Edinburgh – scheduled are a meet with fellow one-person shows at the participants’ forum and a gathering of Laughing Horse performers at the Espionage just off the main Royal Mile.
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