So the brilliant thing about not drinking (on the 49th day sober) is that if you stay up until 5 am and wake up at 11, you still feel pretty good. No hangover and no shame or regret about the awful things you did last night or fear that the police might be ringing on the doorbell. I was feeling surprisingly chipper and even better have not got any work hanging over me (I am going to do the final draft of the first radio show on Thursday) so I could relax. Hopefully if and when I do Edinburgh again I won't have quite so much hanging over me and can enjoy myself a bit more, but I have enjoyed most of it, if in a slightly unusual way.
In the afternoon I went for a walk and found myself heading to the Pleasance Courtyard for the first time this Festival. That in itself is remarkable. This used to be where I would hang out pretty much all the time, but I would usually have come up to see some shows, or do some flyering or just hang out with mates. To get to the second last day of the Fringe without having walked into the bustling courtyard makes this a very unusual month for me indeed. And yet I have been here so many times in the past and taken the familiar walk through the back streets to get here that it did feel like I had been here only yesterday. So many memories of this place, where I did all my shows in the 1990s, as well as in 2002 and 2005 (In 2001 I was in the Pleasance Dome, in 2004 I was foolishly tempted away to the Pod Deco and then I moved on to the Underbelly). It was slightly discombobulating to be back. Many places in Edinburgh have some kind of emotional significance to me, but none so much as this courtyard, where I have cried into pints, made friends, seen enemies, been in fights, fallen in love, gnashed my teeth as old loves step out with new beaus and got very, very drunk and behaved like a fucking idiot. I have stood in this courtyard practically every year (2000 was the only time I didn't come up to the Fringe at all) since 1992, almost as long as Bo Burnham has been alive. The ghosts of my life haunt every crevice.
I went down the steps to the gents near the box office. Back in the 1990s, every year, incredibly unpleasant and libelous graffiti would appear about me in the cubicle furthest from the door. Someone at the Pleasance hated me. Perhaps I deserved it. It was a relentless campaign and though there was plenty of bad things you could have truthfully said about me, none of these lavatorial accusations were true. If they had been then it would have been practical and efficient to inform the police rather than just the few men who visited this toilet and bothered to read the writing on the walls. I wanted to go in to check if my embittered nemesis was still trying to spread word of my supposed evil via the most inefficient of media, the toilet wall, but alas that cubicle was in use, so I will never know.
But I can tell you that the man who used the next door cubicle before me had done one of the smelliest shits of all time. If it was a theatrical piece about the decay and corruption of the Western World, then I would have to award it 5 brown stars.
I watched the last episode of Last of the Summer Wine, despite not being a fan of the show and having missed most of the previous 31 series. I somehow managed to pick up the story though. It was the gentlest of comedy possible and would have infuriated the teenage me who would have been unable to understand why anyone would like this shit. But the middle-aged me can see that there is something comforting and reassuring about the programme, even if I think I would have to be 25 years older to get any laughs out of it. The show is packed with sitcom stars of the past and I think it would be an enjoyable sit-com if they were all made to play the characters that had made them famous, but transposed to all living in the same town. It's a shame this is ending just at a point where I am almost old enough to get a part in it.
But how lovely to see Frank Thornton and Peter Sallis, both on the cusp of 90 and both still just about standing and making jokes, even if they have to film all their bits somewhere else and in cutaway because it costs too much to insure them for the exterior filming. Back in the late 90s Peter Sallis had agreed to appear in "Hostages", the sitcom that Stewart and me had written, which alas came to nothing. It would have been a great honour to work with this incredible man. How incredible to be still working at 90. I can scarcely contemplate the concept of me still churning out my crap in 2056. I am sure I will be long dead, or living on Mars with a harem of green space alien women (no other possibility will be countenanced). So hats off to Sallis and Thornton particularly and also to Roy Clarke for writing 31 series of this on his own. It may not be ground-breaking comedy and in some places it might scarcely qualify as comedy at all, but that is still an incredible achievement.
A much better show for me tonight, even if the front of house manager told me beforehand that I had sold 320 seats, which I was amazed by, only to be told just before I went on that I had been given the wrong figures and it was actually 220 (which I would have been delighted about, if that had been the first number given). It was a perfect final performance, but unfortunately there is still one more show to go and pre sales suggest that it might be a more difficult one. But the end is in sight now and I don't feel as trapped and unhappy as I did a few days ago. It is all made a little bit harder by the fact that many shows finished today. The American women who are in the dressing room at the same time as me, but who I never really spoke to (it took a couple of weeks before we even said hello to each other - I don't know if it was me or them being frosty and unfriendly) were talking about getting their flights back home in the morning and the Gutted cast were gearing up for their final show as I left. Justin Moorhouse had packed and gone by the time I was home and like some kind of criminal making off with the profits from a heist will be in Spain when I step on stage tomorrow.
I had been thinking about heading up the hill for another night of sociability, but decided to revert to my 2010 default position and watch telly on the sofa and then did a bit of packing.
It's all over bar the final hour of shouting. I will be performing as the theatres of Edinburgh are dismantled around me.
Nineteen Fringes done and dusted. I will need to do another 46 if I am going to be the Peter Sallis of Edinburgh.
