Last days in Edinburgh always feel weird. Shows don’t get started until midday mostly and then you have to be off to the airport. Traditionally I don’t see much on the last day.

I left my room at 10, with all my luggage, including the remains of a carton of orange juice and a half-hour drunk 2l bottle of lemonade. I’d want it later but for now it was invonveniein to carry.

First stop, George Square Gardens, just because it’s quiet and green and pleasant. Actually, first I’d stopped at the Pleasance Dome to see if the dome really was clear glass. It is. Then George Square Gardens, where I made a sort-of plan, which was mostly to go back to the Pleasance Courtyard to find something to watch. There I got given a flyer for a play/spoken word called Finding Fassbender, in Pleasance This, which is a shipping container. Then down to the Holyrood Coffee Shop for a cheese toastie, in which the cheese was just too rubbery to eat. I came here a few times last year and liked it but this was not the best toastie ever.

After that I went to see Ahir Shah, only the unticketed queue, 35 minutes before the show started, was all the way up the street. Fine. Cold As Iceland, in the same pub, would be even better. Except that by the time we’d queued for 35 minutes, both shows were full, with the Iceland one presumably full of people who couldn’t get in to Ahir Shah.

So I went down the road to see what was on at the Underbelly. Sketch comedy! In the weird dark vaults! Yay!

And finally, back to the Pleasance one more time for Flo & Joan from the adverts.

And now I’m on the tram heading for the airport. 13 shows in 3 days isn’t bad – almost definitely more than I saw in 6 days last year. Having a fully-functioning phone to find shows and book tickets makes a huge difference.

I checked in, nearly finished the lemonade, got slightly confused about where I go at security (bag’s fine, it’s on its way into the scanner, it’s me lost & confused) and had time to get food and sweets before going to my gate.

Swapping 4C for 9D turned out to be a good idea. There was no one in 9C and I got to sit on my own! I watched Mission Impossible 2 on my tablet – a film I know well, fortunately, because I could hardly hear anything over the engines. We flew over Liverpool, we flew over Winchester and I had my phone out with the stopwatch ready. I started it the second the wheels touched the ground and I was back at my car 15 minutes and 35 seconds later, and that included a very necessary quick stop in the terminal. Less than an hour later I was home, sitting on my bed to write this last paragraph.

This morning, when I started writing it in George Square Gardens, I scheduled it to automatically post at about 11.15pm because then it would post whether or not I remembered or had time to come back and add to it later, and also because it’s easier to find a scheduled post than a draft one. But as I was driving over Badbury Rings it crossed my mind that it would post automatically whether I died in a spectacular crash or not, making “I aten’t dead” a total waste of time posting. (I hadn’t set up the link to Facebook. I don’t know how to schedule that. But I might have been dead and you might still have found and read this blog and assumed I wasn’t. I’m home now. I’m not dead. I’m posting it right now by hand.)

07:23 I’m at Southampton Airport. I got petrol, parked at the station & had a disagreement with the ticket machine and still got through security one hour and ten minutes after leaving home. It was misty this morning and then the mist vanished at Canford Bottom, after giving me a quick glimpse of a huge yellow sun through the mist. Driving east at sunrise is fun – as was the idiot at the Ringwood junction who came up and swerved in front of me from my left, swooped around the car in front and then slid away across two lanes.

10:15 We’re in Edinburgh but waiting to be allowed off the plane. I was randomly allocated 16C and I’ve decided I really don’t like not being able to see what’s going on. Also the plane was very hot
Five minutes after I started writing that, I was outside the airport heading for the tram. The bus is right outside the door but the tram is more fun, especially if you get one of the seats right at the front.

15:37 I’ve moved into my little student room on Cowgate. It’s noisy because it literally overlooks Cowgate but at least that means it’s nice and central. I picked up my tickets this morning at the Underbelly, had first lunch sitting under there looking at the big board and hoping to spot something as good as Prophetic Beth (Werewolf Live sounds like it could be promising) and then went off for my first show of 2018: The Amazing Bubble Man. He blows bubbles for an hour, he’s a man and he’s amazing. Not a lie on the poster. The target audience (small kids) are not great. So many taken out, brought back in, arrived three quarters of the way in or just plain yelled or shrieked or fidgeted for an hour. They also do a late night adults only bubble show but that doesn’t start until about the 15th.

After I’d settled into my room, it was off to the Pleasance to see Adam Hess and Marcus Brigstocke, time to come back to my room for half an hour then back to George Square for Andrew Maxwell and the Pleasance again for the Nouse Next Door’s late night show.

When I came out it was cold – not freezing cold but cold enough to want my jumper. As for Cowgate, I thought it was going to be noisy but I hadn’t thought that it might be even noisier at night than day. It’s like being in the middle of the pub and closing the window makes no difference to the noise levels at all, so let’s hope when it says it’s open until 3am that it shuts up very quickly after that.