Zurich - Trip to Edinburgh

A Few Days at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Since I’ve now stopped working, you’d think I’d have more time to write my blog, but instead I’ve been so busy that I completely forgot to write it last week, sorry about that. One of the things I was busy with was a trip to Edinburgh.

It took a lot of organizing and even then I didn’t really do it very well. I’d picked dates when a swim wasn’t coming up and when the flights were at their cheapest (relatively). It was otherwise fairly random as my main aim was to meet up with friends, but then it turned out to be August and when the Festival was on. This immediately made it more difficult to see friends, partly because most of my Edinburgh friends were already booked with visitors and partly because seeing stuff at the Fringe/Festival suddenly takes priority.

I’d booked all my Fringe tickets before I arrived, whilst liaising with Alastair and Rachel about when we’d all be free to meet up for dinner (deciding which shows to prioritise took me a LOT of time!!). I knew I could pick my tickets up at the airport and I was expecting a manned service point but it turned out that it was just a small yellow machine. You put in your credit card which you used to order the tickets, and out all the tickets come! I walked right past it the first time because it didn’t look how I was expecting it to look, but really it was an efficient way of doing it.

I managed to book a very cheap box room via Airbnb as somewhere to stay. By some complete miracle, I found the flat without a problem and that’s even with having to take the local bus and get off at a stop that wasn’t announced in an area I didn’t know. I still don’t know how I managed to do it. The buses in Edinburgh are now like the underground in London – you just use your contactless payment card as you enter the bus and it charges you automatically each time up to the maximum of a day ticket, so you don’t have to worry about finding change or which ticket to get. I hope Switzerland catches up at some point!

My hostess probably thought I was a bit of an idiot because there was this entry system to get in, which apparently opened a box so that you could get the key, but I thought it opened the door, which happened to be open when it shouldn’t have been, so I just went in. My hostess had to hurry out and make sure nobody else took the keys! The room was fine and there were two friendly cats, even the one that was supposedly shy and I would likely not see. However, the flat did smell a bit because of them and my bed was just a camp bed. Nevertheless, I slept really well, and the room was a good price, so I’m not complaining.

She pointed me to the nearest supermarket which was just round the corner, but somehow I walked right past it and got grumpier and grumpier as I couldn’t locate it. It was only when I turned round to go back that I realized I’d walked way too far. I also realized I was having problems in remembering to look in the right direction for the traffic, I’ve got so used to being in Switzerland now. I had a few close calls during my stay!

As always seems to be the case at the Fringe, it can be a bit of a rush to get from place to place in time. I’d booked something for the night I arrived, but it was further away than I thought. Next to the venue, there was a food market, so I ordered some fish and chips, but I had only 10 minutes to eat them. And it wasn’t what I was expecting. It was fried fish but not in batter and a huge chunk of it and the chips were made out of sweet potato. So, actually, it was very healthy, but I couldn’t finish it in 10 minutes and since I don’t normally eat fish, I felt a bit sick when I tried to eat it so fast. I could tell it was tasty though!

The first thing I saw was Pianodrome which is original music (string, percussion, drum, accordion, piano, I think) played in a setting made from upcycled pianos. As is often the case when I hear musicians, it made me feel how wonderful it must be to be so creative and to really dedicate yourself to something you love so much. As happened at several performances, they made a plea for donations so that they could keep going and also a plea for a permanent venue.

I must have seen 10-11 things altogether (a mixture of plays, exhibitions, music, dance, immersive experience). I didn’t have one dud, although the thing I least enjoyed was the photographic exhibition – there just weren’t many that appealed to me, with quite a few fantasy photographs and what seemed to me to be self-indulgent female nudes (did that photograph really require nudity?), which aren’t really my thing.

The last thing I saw was The Fragility of Man, which had been fully booked and then had an extra performance, so I was able to get a ticket. I think it was the guy’s father doing a survey as you queued to get in, which was a nice touch; he was warning about the strong content! It turned out that this was his son’s 52nd performance (how can he manage to keep it so fresh on each performance?). The room was sweltering (and full); I was sweating just sitting there, so how the actor wasn’t silently dying as he put his all into the performance is beyond me. What amazed me at the end was that he’d written and acted it; I have no aspirations to act, so to be able to do both so well is stunning.

I saw one thing with Alastair which has a title that is a palindrome “Are we not drawn onward to new erA” and the first half was basically played backwards and spoken backwards and the second half was the recording of that played backwards so that the language and the actions then made sense, even if the voices sounded a little odd (the backward language sounded like Russian to my ears! However, they kindly included subtitles on the forward recording in case of ambiguity due to strange tonality when the backward speech became “normal” speech); there was an underlying ecological message.

With Rachel I saw a beatbox version of Frankenstein which brought home to me how much I don’t know about how today’s youth speak, act, and think and makes me wonder if I really should be having teenagers as my main characters in my novels due to my ignorance!

I was two minutes too late for one of my plays and wasn’t allowed in; I was also two minutes too late for the one-man Korean MacBeth (with subtitles), but was able to get into that one; I‘d been charging along the street trying to get there!

There’s too much to talk about really. Alastair, Rachel, Jessie and I met up for dinner and it was so good to catch up. On my non-Fringe day, I met up with Caroline for lunch, who I haven’t seen for a long time. And I also went for a swim in the Commonwealth pool which had been refurbished five years ago and was very different from when I used to do my early morning swims before work when I lived in Edinburgh. It’s heated by solar panels (in Edinburgh!), the toilets used waste water for flushing, and they had little spin dryers for your wet costume – all fantastic!

It all went too fast, but next year, I intend to stay for 2-3 months. That’s when I’ll really be able to catch up with everyone.