Thursday, August 28, 2008

Fringe Hard

For the past few years I’ve not really been able to take part in the smorgasbord of art, entertainment and sexual deviancy that is the festival(s) season in Edinburgh. Not having the money to attend I’ve generally chosen to ignore the high jinks as going into town would just depress me, and then how would anyone tell me apart from the majority of my fellow citizens. This year however, thanks to a good friend of mine getting me review work for the local paper, I’ve had the chance to dive headlong into the meshugas.

I have, on the whole, enjoyed myself. I’ve seen many shows, spotted some talent, letched at many a lady young enough to be my daughter and thanks to another good buddy I spent an interesting evening watching well known comedians play poker very badly.

But enough of the good stuff, that’s not what this blog was designed for. You want to hear about the things that have pissed me off, the petty complaints which I’ve built up in great mountains full of bile ready to explode in pyroclastic clouds of hate. Well if you insist…

Let’s start with the locals. Having avoided the Fringe for the last few years I’d forgotten what a miserable, sour faced whinging lot of bastards my fellow Edinburghers can be. For four weeks this city becomes the artistic hub of the planet, but do they care? No. They moan about the inconvenience, the noise, the late night opening etc.

Underpinning all this is, of course, jealousy. Every day these people go to their offices or factories, do their jobs and come home to mince and tatties followed by the X factor and casual masturbation. Whilst they sit there stroking themselves with all the joy of a Morrissey fan they know that just a bus ride away is a bacchanalian orgy going on but they’re too repressed to join in. They want to of course, its forbidden fruit and it’s so close, but every fibre of their Calvinist being tells them to fight.

Yes, deep down they would love to find out what it’s like to be dry humped in a close by a Slovakian mime artist. They desire nothing more than to wear a couple of knife juggling midgets like a pair of gloves or catch clymidia from a second year art student called Tamsin or Rupert (or both), but everything they’ve been taught and brought up to believe in prevents them from doing so. Instead they sit at home and seethe and soon that builds into a carapace of resentment year upon year eating away at their soul, until eventually they turn into the hunched backed, rheumy eyed Edinburgh pensioner who, if you lean over and whisper “Festival” in their ear, will go off like a deranged Catherine wheel – “Festival is it? I can tell you fifty things I hate about the Festival before I even have time to wet myself”

As I will outline in my next blog there is much to hate about the festival period, but it isn’t going anywhere, so whilst it’s here I think the populace should just grow up and embrace it with both hands (gloved hands – we don’t want to catch anything) and get into the spirit (£4.00 a shot). They should go out and enjoy a show or two – which is about as much as they can afford – and carouse in the bars with minor TV celebrities and Australian backpackers drunk on Lidl vodka. Of course if they really want’ to avoid it they could just go to London for the month as everybody there has come here.