Festivities

Wow, what a long time without my Plog. And I have missed it.

I have seen eleven shows since I last wrote. If I were to review them all, my little head might pop. That has been known to happen occasionally.

So here are some edited highlights from the last week:

The gig at the Backyard was a high-quality bill, but suffered from an audience of only six. Three of whom were my friends. Still, it was a nice enough evening.

Macbeth at the Regent's Park open air theatre was very good indeed. Though this summer's weather has been pants and I was rather chilly (even with my two coats and a jacket) by the end of the evening. My friends had brought along high-quality nibbles, which certainly helped.

I very carefully booked my taxi to Euston for the next morning. It arrived nice and early, and I was at the station a good half an hour before my train was due to depart. And then I looked at my tickets and realised that the train was indeed due to depart in half an hour... from King's Cross. Which was about five minutes from where I'd been staying the night before. Ho hum. Luckily, the fact I'm always early meant that I still made it to the station with time to spare.

I managed not to kill little Paddy and Roisin who were under the age of five, in the seat in front of me and arguing over Thomas the Tank Engine for approximately four and a half hours. This took most of my willpower for the rest of the weekend.

It was lovely to see Nice Kate in Edinburgh. We had an exciting packed Festival, full of hugely fun things. We saw: Why You're Fat and Ugly and Everybody Hates You (I did question with Kate if I should be taking some sort of hint from this production. She said I wasn't fat, but wouldn't elaborate further.). Then we saw Richard Herring in the evening - on good form as usual.

Saturday we saw, Barnaby Brown - Orphan Extraordinaire which was strange, but funny and clever. In the afternoon we saw 40 Feathered Winks - a kind of dance piece that I'd have never chosen myself, but which we both really enjoyed and found powerful and moving, and I've been thinking about it a lot ever since.

We saw A Porthole into the Minds of the Vanquished. We didn't understand this at all. It was recommended by a friend, but I just didn't get it. There was one funny song about a man trapped in a mobile. "I am Henry Giffin, I'm inside your phone." But even that was... well, it was an odd experience, but every Fringe should have one.

We saw Ben Miller read The Phone Book for 20 minutes. We saw Rhod Gilbert be funny and Welsh. We saw Micky Flanagan be criminally under-rated and hugely funny. And on Sunday we went to see The Early Edition, but sadly there wasn't any free coffee this year because they ran out of cups.

Nice Kate didn't even pinch me this year, though she did threaten to kick me up the arse. This is apparently my own fault. I am beginning to think that "Nice Kate" might be a misnomer.

Edinburgh itself was cold and rainy, but I genuinely think it is always this way. People who live there are made by the government to tell you that, "It's not normally like this," but that is a lie. It is either rainy or rainier. Sometimes it snows. The Edinburgh Festival is brilliant and I love it lots. But I would very much like to moot the idea of a Bournemouth or possibly South of France Festival though. Have a think. Let me know.

It was late when I got back to London and the train journey home seemed interminable. An old lady started a dull conversation with me about having lived in Stevenage all of her life. I was so bored that I was actually grateful for the conversation. About Stevenage. And never leaving it. I think my life hit a low at that point.

I hadn't seen my flat in days and we were joyfully reunited. In fact, we went to bed together.