A walk around Edinburgh provides a welcome distraction from negative thoughts. Image: Jim Divine on Unsplash
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It is 38 years since I first visited the Edinburgh Fringe. I was a very eager 18-year-old and I loved it all. So many grey corners that were propelled into technicolor for three weeks. It is very different now: vast, overwhelming and, at times, feeling very corporate.
I start the festival with skin thinned by four months without a day off. This is not a good thing, as you need extra insulation for the strange psychological mess this intense festival can create.
In the first couple of days, I perform to the fewest people I’ve played to on the Fringe for many years and so the fog comes down. I feel bleak and pointless, and as if 34 years of performing have been for nothing.
Then I reset my mind – something that would have been impossible before I got to know it properly in my early 50s. I remind myself that I am here for three weeks to create and to make, and that must be the most important thing. I have no PR or big posters; I still treat the Fringe as if it were a fringe (yeah, old school).
I remind myself of something I often tell other people and must remember myself: “Build it, and they might not come, but you’ve still built something.”
I have discovered that my evening show, Ice Cream for a Broken Tooth, is four times longer than the slot allows, so now I have four envelopes containing entirely different poems and stories and the audience pick a number and that becomes the show.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
The daytime show is about curiosity and finding beauty when the world can seem so bleak and bullying. Trying to stock up on joy as an act of rebellion. Every morning, I walk around Edinburgh and see things that fascinate. In Lochend, the poppies have found their perches in inhospitable places. One is growing in the middle of the road and placed itself so perfectly central that it has survived and grown and offers a splash of red in the heavily potholed tarmac.
I find architecture, colour, bees and people. At the 5K run in Holyrood Park, a woman sits on the verge with two wooden spoons. She plays them relentlessly, offering a supportive beat for those who stumble.
I overhear an American tourist saying, “They’ve been cooking meat and potatoes for two hundred years. That’s why they do it so well.”
I accept flyers for shows of dance and song – and even ask for them and chat a little if the flyerer looks despondent.
The remarkable array of bookshops in the city means that I have picked up volume four and volume five of the Meat Industry and Meat Inspection handbooks of 1910. I am a vegetarian, but also a sucker for old colour illustrations of diseased meats, as well as books on 19th century choreographers and a 1938 copy of the Radio Times.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Today there is rain and the hint of a hurricane, so I will walk through the park in my anorak and see how the colours have changed.
Joy can be a battle, but I try to make the finding of it a relentless preoccupation.
While you’re here, let me recommend shows by Josie Long, Caitriona Dowden, Marjolein Robertson, Gavin Webster. And for children, how could you resist Lindsey Cole’s The Mermaid, the Otter and the Big Poo?
The Fringe can break you, but know there are always people out there who are ready to help reassemble you.
Robin Ince is a comedian, poet and broadcaster.His shows at the Edinburgh Fringe run until 17 August. Tickets for the daytime show and the evening show are still available
