Catmachine

For some reason - probably being busy or at least as busy as you can be when actually on holiday - I didn't get the time to complete this aide memoire whilst still in Edinburgh. So I'd better do it now before memories fade but the scars still linger... Saturday 19 August I think this is where I left you. Made my way over to the Gilded Balloon to see Hils Barker - a show I had not only done the poster for but also designed some fake chicklit covers for: Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the show. Friendly, chatty standup with just the right level (for me) of annoyance with the world and some amusing musical sequences too. I then made my way over to the Pleasance Courtyard and saw Star Trip - a comedy-mime-music-dance science fiction show.Very odd. The second half of it was pretty good though. Afterwards I suddenly discovered that we would be doing a Gonzo show after all... Sunday 20 August Up latish and into town as per. J and I met up with M and made our way over to the Baby Bel...

And so on and so forth... Got back into town the following day just before J's show. Hung around the courtyard for a while then had a drink with J,P,D and D's brother & friend before making my way across to the Smirnoff Underbelly to see Gary le Strange: Beef Scarecrow . Another great show. Very different from the previous ones and somewhat disturbing. In a good way. Then it was off to Brookes for the rest of the evening. So - so far two days and two shows. Not a good rate as I'm only here for a very few days. I'll have to do something about that today.

Another in the occasional series of not-so-much-a-blog-as-an-aide-memoire-to-prevent-myself-forgetting my holidays... After a flight which involved a lot less hassle with the security than I had imagined (I actually turned up to early to check in) I arrived in Edinburgh. It was raining. I walked from the bus stop to the Pleasance Courtyard which didn't seem to have changed - odd to think that it doesn't actually exist as such outside August. Met up with J, D and P, hung around for a while and then went to see their show ( Bad Play: Second Coming ). Which was excellent. Would definitely like to see it again and not just because it's family. After that it was off to Dolphinton for a relatively early night and ten hour's sleep, which was greatly appreciated as I was a little the worse for wear after the apparent "excesses" in Brighton the night before.

Once again I find I've disappointed myself by not writing anything here for simply ages. And once again I must insist that it's not a case of writer's block – I haven't even got far enough to discover whether I'm suffering from that particular ailment. No, the problem is that I'm still under the thrall of a spell of extreme busyness (as opposed to business). Luckily things now seem to be easing off – just ever so slightly. Nevertheless, this has been one of my busiest periods ever, especially regarding the freelance workload. I had – well actually still have – a couple of largish projects on the go which were taking up most of the time I normally allocate to this sort of stuff. And then, all of a sudden, after a silence of over two years, old clients came crawling out of the woodwork en masse like an infestation of termites demanding further work and updates to projects I'd created for them in the past. So what brought that on? The odd thing about this is ...