Another one done.
There was a definite end of term atmosphere to the final podcast, but it was packed with incident, especially for those in the room. Rumpel returned and this time he was in his jester outfit and long Noseybonk style nose (alas he had changed back by the time we took the photo). He is as eccentric off stage as he is on, but after last year I knew that a 40 minute interview might be stretching it (though I was keen to give it a go), but luckily I had
Orbax and Pepper as a back up. These extreme circus performers would have looked weird had they been following anyone else but the Kangaroo king. They are podcast fans from Canada and they had set themselves the task of getting a photo with me for every day of the Fringe. They had been successful, though they almost missed me on the day that I had a post show drink with Nicholas Parsons. I thought it would be cool if they got their final shot on stage with me, but also suspected (correctly) as it turned out, that they might be good value as guests.
Indeed they were with stories of accidentally setting themselves on fire and chainsawing each other in the face. I am quite a squeamish man and did not enjoy any of this conversation, but I was equally freaked out by Orbax inserting a fork up his nostril and then getting it out without using his hands (or gravity) and by his amazing bifurcated tongue, which he could make clap (my wife admitted to being intrigued by the implications for oral sex, so I might have to have the operation done myself). Thank God I wasn't as hungover as yesterday or I think I might have been sick. It was a freaky end to a geeky podcast run. You can hear it (and all the others)
here or on iTunes.
I had fun on Twitter winding up Scottish people by claiming that their Scotch money would be useless to me now as you couldn't spend it in my country, so I was giving it all away and asking why we didn't have the same currency given Scotland is a part of England. You'd think that with so many errors in so few characters that no one could think I was serious or would feel the need to correct me. You'd think wrong. I felt pretty bad about upsetting those Scotch people as I know the last thing that they'd ever do is attempt to wind up an English person.
But there was little time to let the end of the Fringe sink in. I headed back to the flat to load up the podcast, finish packing and load up the car. There were parties in town but we'd decided to drive a quarter of the way home tonight. There's nothing to be gained by hanging around once this thing is over and driving to London in a day with a hangover did not appeal.
The podcast loaded into the dropbox folder about three minutes before we left the Fringe behind for another (final?) time. We got a couple of hours down the road - maybe we should have gone a bit further, but the Premier Inn off of junction 42 of the M6 had been booked and we got a warm welcome there and a pleasant enough dinner. We had escaped to England - our Colditz adventure finally over and once over the border we were safe from the Nazi guards (though the money we had got there was of course now useless, so we burned it all on the border).
