I’ve just got had a knackering but brilliant few days up in Scotland at my first Edinburgh Fringe! I was basically there for 57 hours, getting home late last night, and in that time managed to take in a total of 13 shows! It was pretty intense!

I’d only decided last weekend to head up there, so the guys at Gag Reflex got me some complimentary tickets for some of the shows they were producing, and I then found some other shows that still had tickets available that would fit around them.

Here’s a list of all the shows I got to see:

1. ‘John Bishop – Winging It’ at the Udderbelly Cowbarn
2. ‘Ben Hart – Belief?’ at the Guilded Balloon
3. ‘Milton Jones – Milton Jones Is Out There’ at the Assembly Rooms
4. ‘The Craig Ferguson Show – with guests Scott Gibson, Shappi Khorsandi and Eddie Izzard’ at the Rose Theatre
5. ‘Lou Conran – I love Lou C’ at The Mash House
6. ‘Jonny Awsum – Honey, I Promised the Kid’ at The Caves
7. ‘John Robins – The Darkness of Robins’ at the Pleasance Courtyard
8. ‘Colin Cloud – Dare’ at the Pleasance Grand
9. ‘Tape Face’ at the Pleasance Grand
10. ‘Funz and Gamez – Flogging a Dead Horze’ at the Grassmarket Community Project
11. ‘Radu Isac – One Romanian Answering Questions’ at the Argyle Bar & The Cellar Monkey
12. ‘Morgan & West – Return of the Time-Travelling Magicians’ at the Underbelly Med Quad
13. ‘Fast Fringe’ at the Pleasance Dome

I was staying down in the new town, and most of the shows take place in the old part of the city, so I had to make the pretty steep climb up The Mound each morning, and then it felt like you were always climbing a set of stairs to get to the next place!

The weather was pretty rubbish – it rained for a lot of the time, but because I’d crammed so many shows in, I was indoors for a lot of the time! I’d love to go again another year, but the biggest obstacle is the cost of accommodation – it’s so expensive to stay up there during the fringe. The Travelodge I was staying in was 4 times more expensive than outside of the dates of the fringe weeks – crazy.

Anyway, thanks to Gag for giving me some free tickets to keep costs down!