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The Fringe Blog - Sort Of! (5)Dateline: 21st August, 2005Today has been the most annoying day I have spent at the Fringe for some years! Every year I make the same mistake - I order tickets for at least a couple of shows on their day off - and every year I swear I will not do it again. This year I didn't - until today. hecking over my tickets for the day I noticed that those for the first and last shows were missing. Well, I knew that I had checked every ticket request carefully to make sure that I hadn't chosen a day off but I thought I'd better double-check before sounding off at the press office. Whoops! Ah well, there was another show I fancied seeing at the Pleasance and I was in the Pleasance Press Office (meeting Philip and Catherine actually), so I asked for a ticket. "Oh, today's its day off," I was told. Grrrrr! OK, there was one other show at roughly the same time at the Underbelly, so I rang their Press Office. "I'll just check to see that it is on today," the girl said. I nearly said "Of course it is. I've just checked!" but realised that my track record wasn't exactly the best so I kept quiet. It was on, so I booked a ticket. We sat and chatted for a while, exchanging stories of the shows we'd seen and the people we'd bumped into, and then went our separate ways. I saw the Underbelly show and then headed off to C Electric (for those who know Edinburgh, it used to be the Odeon Cinema on Clerk Street). I got there very early so I didn't bother to go in but found somewhere to sit quietly, make notes on the previous show and go through the programme, looking for something to replace my last show. There was nothing that (a) I wanted to see, (b) someone else was already down to see, or (c) wasn't having a day off. So I decided to have an early night and fit in a show in the two and a quarter hours between by 4.00 and 7.00 shows I thought I deserved a treat so I booked something that wasn't strictly theatre - The Birth of the Cool at the Gilded Balloon - but which really appealed to me. By now it was time to go to see F***ing Asylum Seekers, so I went back to C Electric, only to be confronted by a notice which read "Please note: today's performance of F***ing Asylum Seekers has been cancelled due to unforeseen cirumstances." Without much hope I checked that it did apply to today's performance and wasn't left over from yesterday. It wasn't, so I had four hours to fill in before my next show. The only time I ever have this amount of time between shows in Edinburgh is when I'm sleeping. I didn't even have a book to read, so I wandered along to Blackwell's but couldn't settle to browsing their extensive shelves. As I am someone who cannot enter a bookshop without spending at least twenty quid, this shows the agitated state of mind I was in. Anyway the time passed - I spent it smoking (yes, I know!) and snoozing on a seat in High Street - and I went off to the Gilded Balloon, enjoyed the show and headed off to Richard Demarco's venue at Lady Roxburgh's Church for what was to be my last show of the day. Coming out from that I decided to spoil myself and try Saffrani, an Indian restaurant in West College Street. It's well worth a visit: their Fish Pakora is excellent! Afterwards, about ten o'clock, I thought I'd wander up to Bristo Square and grab a cab back to the digs for an early night. I had to pass the Pleasance Dome so I decided pop in for a final drink, only to bump into Steve Lambert of Badac Theatre Company and a friend of his. I finally caught that cab at about quarter to midnight! >> Day 6
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