A few days off from fringe-binge then back to the fray

Week three and steam is running out, enthusiasm is waning and general jadedness sets in. Four days of Fringe avoidance, real life - oh, and work which funds all this, took priority. Then I stepped out again for a couple of events linked only by their proximity in the old town.

The Caves under North Bridge is my least favourite venue. Edinburgh, for the past few years has hosted fringe shows in too many damp, dungeon-like (in an entirely non-kinky way), dark and every other D you can come up with spaces, that must cause staff the most ghastly health problems. Every time I go, I come out feeling ill and I'm only in there for an hour. It would be so much better to spread the venues out again and have more wee church halls in far-flung bits of the city taking the strain instead of it all being, admittedly conveniently, squeezed into the city centre.

Anyway, I went to only my second show this year in the Caves having deliberately avoided even those shows I quite fancied. But I returned to see Caroline Mabey Eat Your Friends. It seemed to have positive reviews, so, in order to boost the number of female comics I've seen this year, I went.

The audience was on the sparse side, but were supportive of her act. I'd put up with numerous comments from the stage this year at different shows, because I kept forgetting my glasses meaning I had to sit at the front thus rendering myself a vulnerable target, but I'd never, until now, had to get up on the stage.

I have no spontaneity, I am not an entertainer, I am a bit deaf and really rather slow to catch on and have a life-long inability to understand or follow instructions. I am not a good choice to shove on stage. But I already knew that. However, I'm not unduly shy and so I agreed, since there were only another 8 or so folk watching. I managed not to do anything right, but I repeat, there were only another 8 or so folk there to witness it. So, next year, no front seats, no making eye contact with the act and no getting up on stage - ever.

Good, that's that out of my system.

I had a few minutes to walk the few yards up the next cobbled lane to yet another awful venue. Banshee Labyrinth was hosting the Skeptics on the Fringe shows. I'd wanted to go to several of those, but they all clashed with me having to be somewhere else. Finally I made it to Dr Caroline Watt's talk on the Parapsychology unit at Edinburgh University.

Wonderfully interesting and far too short, except from the point of view that this was such an uncomfortable seat my relief at standing up possibly won over the feeling that I wanted to hear much much more from this speaker.
Before the talk I'd completely forgotten that long ago I'd taken a psychology module. Dormant knowledge was helpfully activated and retrieved and I followed most of the talk.  I was also reminded why I didn't go on to take more psychology studies, far preferring psychodynamic theory to psych-experiments in the name of an ology. All long before we apparently all became hardwired evol psych bots with no free-will.

Um, was that a bit hard on the evol psychs? Nah!