Another solid show, another 100 or so punters. All looking good, but with 180 seats to sell I need the word of mouth to spread to avoid losing too much money. So come on internet, do what you're good at and pass on the information. I could be the new Lily Allen. I also had a great gig at Spank, where I turned a potentially difficult audience round. It made me realise how much I have come on as a stand up this year. There is a new assurance in my performance and I am loving almost every moment of this job now. Late n Live next week will be the real tester though. More importantly I stayed up til 3am and had a few drinks, proving that the 39 year old Richard Herring hasn't lost it after all. I may regret it in the morning- especially given I still have a lot of work to do on the script and want to get it done by Monday morning, but it was an early taster of the fun that can be had up here and I bumped into lots of friends, which made the temporary loneliness of my after gig tonight seem like a distant memory. I even saw the theatre and opera director Stewart Lee. I believe he used to be on telly in the mid to late 1990s. I can't really remember.
One of the things I enjoy about Edinburgh is the way that this sudden influx of performers and street artists and oddly dressed idiots makes it impossible to distinguish the theatre company member from the out and out mad person. What would seem strange and remarkable on a November afternoon in Edinburgh, becomes a twisted kind of normality.
So walking down Princes Street this afternoon I saw a man of about thirty walking towards me wearing a golden plastic crown. In every other respect he looked like one of the wiry, jumper wearing local citizens. He wasn't carrying leaflets, he wasn't smiling or singing, he looked a bit hard and unlike the usual kind of University educated Fringe performer. But he was wearing a gold plastic crown. Was he on his way to perform in some gritty production of Macbeth? Was he making some artistic interactive street performance about how we are all kings of our own worlds? Or was he just a mental person who sees nothing unusual about walking around central Edinburgh at 2pm wearing a gold plastic crown? Whatever the truth in the context of this Festival he became a work of art.
Also for the last couple of days on my way to the gym I have passed a very wee old white haired man with a beard and glasses. He is meek and tiny and fragile and maybe in his eighties. But both times I have gone by he has looked at me and timidly whispered "Hello!" I don't think I have met him before and I am pretty sure that he is unlikely to have seen any of my work. He's just a nice old man who wants to be friendly, who is perhaps a little crazy or perhaps a little lonely. There is a chance though that he might just be a student playing a part or maybe it's Laura Solon trying out a new character. But there's a part of me that would like to start a conversation with him, have a drink with him in the pub he sits outside in the afternoon and become his friend. I could spend the whole festival hanging out with him, rather than the good time drug-taking, sexually promiscuous youngsters who fill all the venue bars. He is after all a bit closer to my age.
Maybe next year, if God willing he is still amongst us.
I have one more year of my thirties and one more year of pretending to fit in with the young crowd. Next year it will be halves of heavy in non-Fringe welcoming pubs with little old men, talking about the 1950s. I look forward to it. It would keep me out of trouble.
