At lunchtime a couple of Fridays ago I did my now-customary furtive change into cycling gear in the disabled toilet before heading off for North Berwick. The Social (Engineering) Committee’s semi-annual Beach Party was kicking off over at Seacliff Beach, and I decided to cycle there rather than take the shaky old coach they’d booked for the occasion.

It was not exactly a great journey, it must be said. The constant headwind wore me down and the traffic along the coastal road kept me on edge for almost the entirety of the 40-kilometre journey. For the last couple of kilometres, though, out east of North Berwick where no-one seems to want to go, the road emptied of cars, the wind dropped and the sun broke through the clouds. I rolled down the private road to the beach, pulled a pair of baggies over my indecent cycling shorts and grabbed a beer. It was a great afternoon spent milling between the beach and the marquee laid on for the day, quaffing booze on the company dollar and eating barbequed meat until my sides groaned from the strain.

I slung the bike in a luggage compartment under the bus for the return journey and would have happily called it a day, but it wasn’t over yet. Once I’d sobered up to a degree and put on some long trousers, I was off out again to meet Doug and some of his London workmates to see Mark Watson at the Church of Scotland on the Mound, or the “Assembly Hall” as it’s rebranded for the Fringe. Maybe knowing that you’re watching a comedy gig in the house of God would otherwise take the edge off — the Almighty’s watching too, and he kills a kitten whenever you laugh at a masturbation joke.

The show was solid if not quite stellar, but the three hours of increasingly sozzled conversation in the Wash which succeeded it amused us admirably. Doug, the newly arrived Davis and I got stuck into self-referential and obscure band chat with ease, while Doug’s friend Rob looked on and feigned interest with remarkable success. I rolled home at 3 am, tired, as they say, but happy.

…and then met up with Doug and co. again the next evening for more festival boozing. Bolstered by the attendance of Fat Pete and the Captain, we saw Henning Wehn perform “My Struggle” in a dank vault under North Bridge. (He’s German, and the title of the show is nothing if not bold.) I was in two minds about the gig; for the most part it was observational humour with a fairly cutting edge to it, but it was let down by some don’t-mention-the-war stereotyping that I think a 2010 Fringe audience doesn’t have much use for.

After the show we decamped to the temporary beer garden in the still-vacant hole where La Belle Angele and the Gilded Balloon used to stand, sank a few pints and chatted amiably for a while. Alright; we played drinking games. I begged off around 1am (so I could get up early the next day for a bike ride with Edinburgh RC, but that’s a post for another time), shook hands/man-hugged everyone in attendance as appropriate and walked home through the chilly, clear night. It had been an excellent couple of days, and I now find I’m hankering for another London trip to try for another weekend of carefree culture+drinks.

* * *

In other news, Jeff, Devon, Neil, Vanessa, Jez and I won the Cumberland pub quiz the Monday after the abovementioned Fringe action; Jez, Ally, Row and I came a valiant second this following week, and finally last night Jez, Row, Tom and I got thoroughly wrecked in honour of Jez’s birthday after gorging ourselves on Row’s expertly prepared dinner. I walked home at 2 am with War of the Worlds playing on my headphones. Need I say more?

We went out last week to see Belly of a Drunken Piano — a Tom Waits tribute act Ash had fallen upon in the Fringe programme — at the Assembly Rooms. We met up with Ally G, Jez and Serena down at the Star Bar for some pre-show chat and a few pints, and somehow (I may have been plugging the RF‘s new layout) Ally and I ended up having an extremely rock and roll conversation about typography. (Maybe I’m being slightly disingenuous: Eric Gill for instance, designer of the ubiquitous Gill Sans, was a deeply weird chap into incest and bestiality among other even less savoury things, so perhaps it isn’t such a staid subject.) We headed up to the show at midnight, grabbed a drink in the venue and took a seat front and centre. I will be honest: I don’t quite see the luminous greatness in Tom Waits that Ash does, but with a pseudo-Tom in front of us, belting out drawly bar-room numbers through a light haze of alcohol and fatigue, it wasn’t bad at all.

We had a last, giddy jar in an almost deserted Grand Cru on the way home. The majority of the clientèle had tallyho’ed onto Po-na-na or Garibaldi’s, so we were able to take the booth of our choice and blether in peace for a while longer before the staff shooed us out at 3 am. I’ve been an unrepentant festival sceptic so far this year, but I have to say it was a great night out!

We did take in Dr. John up at the Queen’s Hall the other week as part of the Jazz and Blues Festival. (None of your plebeian Fringe malarkey for us Stockbridge types!) Ash and Giancarlo were both foaming at the mouth with excitement but my relative ignorance left me mildly curious more than anything else. In the event the show was perfectly fine, but it didn’t get my blues-sense tingling at all; after Gilded Splinters‘s voodoo opulence it might as well have been any old honky-tonk blues band from the deep south. The upper circle pews feel like they were designed to keep the righteous upright during long sermons and didn’t lend themselves to laid-back enjoyment of the Devil’s music, so we took turns sneaking down to the bar to fetch a couple of pints to dull the nagging discomfort. Happily a standing ovation erupted for the encore; we gratefully levered ourselves up, clapped along with everyone else and headed home.

Last week we met up with the usual suspects for some jazz (nice!) at 80 Queen Street, picking an empty booth near the back.

“Wow, you got the perfect seat,” said Jeff.

“You mean as far away from the band as possible? A ha ha.”

This year the flyering masses seem to have hit upon a new way of distributing their forests of leaflets: that of hitting upon the public. Ash mentioned that a Canadian “comedian” had more or less attempted to chat her up in order to secure her attendance at his gig the next night, and I suffered a similar fate at the hands of a prowling young fashionista.

Ash arrived in the nick of time and we escaped to Favorit for some lunch and chat in the sun. I was ravenous, having run the Water of Leith 10K earlier that day*, and felt suitably deserving of lunch and a pint. Ash had a coke float with strawberry ice cream, and upon sampling it I declared it to be like strawberry heroin. It was fearsomely good, and astonishingly bad for one’s health. At first I thought I could detect the coke and the ice cream reacting fizzily but then perceived it to be my teeth dissolving under the onslaught of sugar present in the liquid almost to the point of saturation. Tasty stuff indeed.

We wandered over to the Meadows with a blanket and a bottle of wine and proceeded to alternately read wanky books and criticise the great unwashed sharing the park with us. I rolled my eyes at a group of hippy/punk hybrids, and we speculated that the Rastafarian types making surreptitious hand gestures at each other were all drug dealers. All in all, it was a very snobbish, middle class and marvellously entertaining weekend. Maybe I like the festival after all.

* I managed it this year in 46 minutes and 30 seconds – which is a minor miracle given how little training I’ve done this year. I have an unhelpful tendency to run as fast as I feel comfortable regardless of how far I have to go, and so I shot away at the start only to be hobbled by a fearsome stitch as I came to Stockbridge. I slowed right down and managed to speed up again a bit towards the end and somehow shaved a minute off last year’s time. Thanks to those of you who sponsored us this year!