Edinburgh Fringe reviews: August 2004–2010 (not 2006)

Despite not being a performer, showing up at the Edinburgh Fringe every August was a very formative part of my young adulthood as I kept up with the latest work of some of my adolescent idols. My path through life would have forked unrecognisably without its influence.

The 2004 Fringe was my first solo excursion, a valuable taste of independence right before university. I popped up again briefly the next year, missed 2006 for financial reasons, then when I had to decide what the hell I was going to do with myself after graduating in the summer of 2007, pre-festival Edinburgh seemed as good a place as any to relocate to. No, it seemed like the best and only option.

After leaving the UK and travelling for almost a year, I felt particularly homesick in August 2011 knowing that I was missing it, but Reekie was a bit too extreme a pilgrimage from Indonesia. Every year since it's affected me less, and this year I forgot all about it until near the end of the month, probably because Richard Herring isn't banging on about it and neither he nor Stewart Lee are even there.

Since I haven't done this in one place before, here are my Fringe diaries, mostly processed through the filter of paid or free-ticket review sites that have all expired now and had to be dug up through the Internet Archive.

The further adventures of self-indulgence: All my British homes

We've finally secured a reasonably good internet connection, so before I'm inevitably thrown back to the dial-up ages I've been making the most of those advanced, high-bandwidth services that you lucky people in the developed world take for granted, like YouTube videos above 144p, non-HTML Gmail and Google Street View, which enables less fortunate people to imagine they're wandering the real streets of wealthier countries in 2009.

I've thought for a while that when I finally make it back to the UK and visit the family, I might also take a tour of my childhood homes and haunts in search of overwhelming primal nostalgia or crushing existential despair about the transience of our brief lives. Any emotion would be fine really.

But since we just built a house, and that rules out travel for this year at least, I settled for a synthetic virtual substitute and spent an hour or so clicking along familiar routes to schools, playgrounds and newsagents where the latest issue of Dinosaurs! magazine with another free bit of glow-in-the-dark Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton isn't waiting for me any more. I didn't feel much of anything.

If you're ever in South Cheshire, Lancaster or Edinburgh and you feel like paying tribute to my life, here's where to light those candles.

Pre-lance Planne(u)r

In Fife, in another life

I started this blog in September 2010 as a self-indulgent travel journal, a means to let anyone who cared know what I was getting up to, so I didn't feel obligated to join a social network or something, and as a way to keep myself sane during the more emotionally confusing and stressful times. It's succeeded admirably.

Before this blog, my only means of expressing these feelings, whims and frustrations was in the form of Word documents written for my own benefit and saved to my hard drive. There's also the angst-ridden emails to the few people I feel comfortable talking about deeper feelings with, whether they want to hear it or not. This practice is still alive and well, but as a ruthless minimalist I occasionally go through my old emails and annihilate any that I feel don't serve a practical function, so all that girl trouble is hopefully lost forever (unless Oliver still has a load of incriminating stuff from me).

So, for the sake of historical context, here are extracts from some of those documents written in the months leading up to September 2010, offering an insight into my changing mindset, the reasons I left Scotland and my original travel 'plans,' back when I clearly had no idea what travelling involved. I just read it through and it's probably the most pointless and boring post I've ever done, but as an origin story it's at least better than those Star Wars prequels.

Memories of Scotland

Image: SSPIA

Scotland is an important country for me, and one I like to be associated with more than England, which is why I usually tell people I'm from Edinburgh. That's technically true, as it's where I lived for three years before setting off travelling, but only something I say to people who are sufficiently foreign that they won't pick me up on the tell-tale lack of accent.

In my day-to-day life, living in Scotland was no different than living in another attractive old British city, and it's not like my view of this place is completely rose-tinted - despite the deprived areas I've visited in foreign countries, Edinburgh remains the only place I've been violently beaten up and had my head kicked in.

But I don't hold that against the place, like I would car park diarrhoea in Paris (that's a specific reference to a previous post, not just a bizarre analogy), and I had plenty of great experiences here that could only happen in Scotland.

Do first impressions count?

Day one in most countries I visit is usually pretty disappointing/frustrating as I'm forced to deal with over-zealous airport security, incompetent bus drivers and sleazy taxi drivers to get to my accommodation, hoping I don't have to share it with pests (bed bugs or English people).

Sometimes I get rained on as well (the fact that you're even reading this anthology blog means the weather here hasn't improved, or I'd have some tedious travel photos to show you instead).

These first days may be quasi-traumatic on occasion, but they're at least useful for setting the bar extremely low so that I'm easily impressed when/if things go right. And sometimes, they give an accurate indication of what I can expect during my time there.

The Curse of Kellie's Castle

I was pretty excited to find a genuine Scottish castle out here in Peninsular Malaysia. That's genuine Scottish insomuch as it's built in Indian design by Indian labourers, many of whom mysteriously DIED during its construction.

Could this be sensibly attributed to the outbreak of Spanish flu that spread from Europe to Asia after the First World War? Or could it be that Kellie's Castle... is CURSED? You know, the same way Egyptian tombs and Oliver aren't. This sounds like a job for an experienced paranormal investigator...

End of the line

Another pleasant day out, this time taking the Taipei Rapid Transit System TO THE LIMIT, for an EXTREME adventure ON THE EDGE...

What that means is I went all the way up the red line of the metro (I live down near the bottom of the green line by Dapinglin (大坪林), for any celeb stalking fans out there).

Yeah, I know there was a time when I travelled 6,000 miles in a day, but in this weird place I'm too scared of what lies beyond to risk venturing outside of the city. Here may literally be dragons, after all. Or at the very least, a lengthy and frustrating visa application process.

Eternal September

September doesn't usually last this long. Does it?

How does that old rhyme go: 365 days hath September - April, June and November are just fabrications invented by the seasonal gifts industry to sell more Justin Beiber calendars?

(I don't even know who that is, I just saw the name on some kid's top and imagine I'm making a contemporary reference).

In the past, September always seemed to be roughly 4.29 weeks long, but this year it feels like it's lasting forever. Despite my computer, this website, NaNoWriMo and my internal chronometer all informing me that we're rapidly hurtling towards winter, I can still walk outside at night in just a T-shirt without feeling the cold.

Sometimes I wear trousers, pants, socks and shoes as well, though that's more out of decency than fear of catching a chill.

From the Athens of the North to the Athens of Greece

Pointless mission accomplished - by land and sea, I travelled from the self-styled 'Athens of the North' (Edinburgh) to the bona fide 'Athens of Greece' (Athens), with just one cheating plane ride across the Alps.

Arriving by bus in a remote and smelly part of the city, my first impressions of Athens were pretty unfavourable. But I remembered I had a similar reaction to Florence at first, before getting to the nice, pedestrian-friendly tourism parts.

Like in Italian, the word pedestrian in Greek roughly translates as 'public footpath that nevertheless permits motorcycles, as if they aren't basically cars, and stupid bloody choo-choo trains.' With its speedy and sparkling clean metro system too, this shithole has had a major colonic irrigation, but the skidmarks are still clear to see if you venture too far...

Hello there

Hello there, my name's Dave and this is my website place. Since I began this zany travelling adventure I've been inundated with almost four requests to set up some kind of blog to recount my adventures, so that's what this is. Obviously.

Here, you'll find fascinating overviews of destinations I visit, tours I take, dubious advice to help you get around yourself and borderline racist commentary on exotic cultures from my over-privileged, post-colonial perspective. But mostly I'll be aimlessly wandering about.