Afterglow

Right. I promised to blog about more interesting things than my tech-woes didn't I? ...then I buggered off and spent a couple of weeks with assorted visiting guests, doing bits of The Festival, playing tourist in my home town, occasionally hopping in the car* to belt off around the highlands, and hanging out in pubs with friends quite a lot. Plenty to tell you about then. Where to start though?

Well, Festival stuff seems as good a place as any: What have I seen? On the good comedy side it has to be Aeneas Faversham Forever which was - predictably - brilliant, but no gamble as I've been a fan of theirs since back when they were just Improverts. Flip side of that coin would be The Big Value Comedy Show which was a gamble... and not good - one of the four acts didn't show, of the remaining three, we kinda wished two had taken the fourth's lead with only the first being actually funny. I wish I could remember the compere's name as he did a (frankly) heroic job of keeping the night from simply being unpleasant. Away from comedy, I saw a compelling performance of On the Waterfront, (attended by its 93 year old author, which was kinda neat) and then there was the powerful-if-perplexing experience of Dorian Gray which genuinely surprised me since I don't think of myself as a ballet person (let alone a contemporary ballet person) and the whole idea of basing a ballet on the work of an author whose greatest strength is dialogue seemed perverse and fundamentally flawed. It's not, it's genuinely brilliant.

That about sums up my Festival so far, off to something at the Portrait Gallery tonight with the gang, and might catch a last fling show on Saturday night if the mood takes me, then it's Fireworks time Sunday (unless I decide to skip them) and then we start to get our city back from the bloody tourists**

... speaking of <Aussie accent>bloody tourists</Aussie accent> my mate Eric was staying with me for most of the last week, and a very welcome tourist he was too. It's a little inconvenient having such a good friend who lives on the far side of the globe but unsurprisingly we picked right up where we'd left off as soon as he made it through the arrivals gate at EDI. I managed to make a start on returning the favour of playing host/tourguide and flatmate from my month spent in Perth, we did assorted tourist stuff in the city and managed to almost overdose on castles on a whistle-stop tour of the Highlands. Also unsurprisingly Eric got on famously with my crowd here*** which made for a hectic but really fun week socially.

I took a long weekend the weekend before last too, this time so I could hang out with my big bro. We bolted off up to Sutherland and got some implausibly great weather for the few days up there while we alternated between visiting old childhood holiday haunts, and playing in my car, which my brother is now insured on and fell for almost as badly as I have :D I like sharing my toys, although there are a vanishingly small number of people I'd trust behind the wheel of Hobbes.

So that's a skim-reading version of my past couple of weeks, I need to cool off on the car trips for a while because between the Highland trips and my two week road trip round France last month (did I mention that?) I've spent a small fortune on petrol and oil. Actually I'm looking forward to a less hectic few weeks anyway, maybe even getting to spend the odd evening in doing nothing****. Right now though I need to go and get changed for tonight...

*I'm still giddy every time I go anywhere near my car - I'm grinning like a loon now at the thought that it's actually my car... can't imagine that feeling going away any time soon. ...that said nothing has gone expensively wrong with him yet either ;)
**OK, that never actually happens. Tourists are a constant here, but the human tide ebbs significantly after the Fringe ends, though to be fair it's already noticeably less congested around here since the Tattoo finished
***I beamed when on his last day he said: "I don't think I've stopped laughing once since I got here" I really love the way that (on the whole) my friends get on with my other friends
****The other night at the pub Liz paused mid conversation to try and recall when she last did nothing, and realised that it was back in June sometime - I've not been quite that busy but not far off!