A SCOTTISH SPECIAL!

The joy of the Fringe, the most peaceful spot in Edinburgh, an exciting sausage update, and a VERY brilliant new book...

I’ve been up in Scotland for the past few days with my mum and sister, chiefly to see my little brother in his stand-up show at the Fringe. We all used to live up here. Well, close enough to Edinburgh, anyway, in a little Borders town about an hour south of the city. So I know Edinburgh a bit because it’s where we used to come in the holidays to buy school shoes and where I once queued for several hours, aged 15, for the fourth Harry Potter book on the day it was released. Unfortunately, I was once sent from the Edinburgh John Lewis to another shoe shop nearby for BOYS’ SCHOOL SHOES because my feet were too big for girls’ school shoes, so some of these memories are a bit scarring, but mostly I have very happy recollections of the place.

For some reason, even though we didn’t live far away, we never came to the Edinburgh Festival when I was younger. I didn’t visit it until a few years ago, in fact, when my comedian ex-boyfriend had a show up here and I spent a week or so in the city while his show was on, seeing four or five other comedians a day in various venues with sticky floors, eating mostly fried foods and drinking cheap vodka and tonics. I fell in love with the Fringe then, I think. The creativity! The ludicrous posters! The late nights! The laughs! Tony Macaroni the macaroni stall! The £7 tickets! You can see more in a few days here than you might see in a whole year elsewhere. It’s magic, even with the drizzle and the constant background drone of bagpipes. (If you can play the bagpipes, even remotely, it’s not a bad shout to come and busk here in August. When I was a teenager, I had a Scottish friend who could play them and he’d make £600 a day just standing in the street. WILD.)

And it’s not just comedy, either. Theatre, music, dance, film, books! We passed an a cappella group singing their hearts out in on the street at 10am on Sunday. I saw a poster for something called ‘Aha! Doggy Poo.’ This year, there’s a show taking place in a bathtub, and Hannah Gadsby and Rose Matafeo’s new stand-up shows. There’s a Peruvian adaptation of Hamlet featuring eight actors with Down syndrome, and a feminist German circus collective. There is EVERYTHING. Don’t forget, this is the place that gave us Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, both of which started out life as Edinburgh shows. Pretty magical, like I said.

My little brother Henry (technically my half-brother but because my various steps and half have been in my life for so long, I very much count them all as my proper siblings) has brought a full-length show up here for the first time and, obviously I’m a bit biased, and CHRIST I was nervous beforehand (would we be the only ones there?), but it’s properly brilliant. A sketch comedy show, alongside his writing partner Charlie, in which they play a pair of presenters for a new TV show called Hot Concrete.

Painstakingly explaining comedy, like painstakingly explaining a joke, never does it justice so I won’t go into it here, but if you happen to be up there this week then it’s on at 12.50pm until Sunday in a venue called The Mash House and it’s REALLY VERY GOOD. Honest, my bro’s been a BBC comedy finalist and everything so I’m not just saying this! I didn’t know much about comedy until I went out with my ex, and I still don’t reeeeally, but there were so many flashes of brilliance here. Especially with a character called Timmy Timmy. If you want more details look them up on Instagram (@hotconcreteboys).

It’s quite hard to know what to see up here because there are around 4,000 shows on and if you stroll down the Royal Mile you’ll have 372 flyers thrust into your hands. So word-of-mouth is helpful, I think. Go. Put on your comfiest shoes, pack a raincoat and some Kendal mint cake and go. Partly for puppy-related reasons, we only had time to spend an afternoon in Edinburgh this year and could only see Henry’s show, but I would have spent several days meandering about if I could. The whole thing is wonderful.

Picture of the week

EXCITING SAUSAGE UPDATE! After the sausage discussion a few weeks ago, I’d like to alert you to a Scottish delicacy I’d never come across until yesterday: IRN BRU SAUSAGE. Have you ever seen anything more Scottish in all your life? For anyone reading this who isn’t sure what Irn Bru is, it’s a very Scottish, bright orange fizzy drink which mostly tastes like…sugar? It’s sometimes referred to as ‘Scotland’s other national drink’ after whisky. I used to drink Irn Bru often as a child when I lived up here until a Scottish friend told me they put carpet cleaner in it. For legal reasons I should probably make clear that’s not true, but even so, it’s quite an odd thing to make a sausage from.

I spied the sausage yesterday in quite a posh butcher in Ballater, the Scottish town most famous for being 10 minutes from Balmoral. So, there’s a ‘Balmoral Bar’, a bakery that sells ‘famous Balmoral bread’ (made with wheat berries???), a second-hand bookshop selling every Royal book under the sun, and right now there’s also an exhibition in a litle marquee on the green showing old newspaper clippings of the king as a boy. Also, a butcher (HM Sheridan), where I found these sausages. I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Irn Bru ones, sorry. I bought some plain old pork ones for dinner last night in the lodge where Mum and I are staying for the next couple of nights.

Poor old butcher, though. I wrote about the various businesses losing their Royal warrants a few months ago. HM Sheridan is one of the places that has just lost theirs after nearly 40 years of supplying Balmoral with meaty bits and bobs (maybe because of the Irn Bru sausages?). So the Royal warrant you can see in the picture I took below will have to come off soon. Still, the plain pork ones were excellent if you’re passing through any time soon and craving some, er, sausage.

Note the Range Rover parked outside. Plenty in these parts at this time of year because plenty of posh sorts are up here shooting and fishing…

Recommendation of the week

Before seeing my brother’s show on Sunday afternoon, Mum, Rosie and I nipped into the National Gallery, just off Princes Street. It’s been tarted up since I last went, and there’s a whole new wing which opened last year where they’ve hung the more modern (1800-1945) stuff. It’s MAGNIFICENT. Free, for a start, and the perfect size to spend an hour or so in looking at Scottish art. Especially if you’re exhausted by the madness of the festival outside. Come here and have a peaceful time wandering through the galleries instead. Without being naff and clichéd, it really did feel like food for the soul. Also, top tip, there are very clean and tidy loos in this gallery, which is quite handy during the festival when other loos are, er, less clean and tidy.

Whenever I go to an exhibition or gallery I play a game called ‘What would I have in my house?’ The rules are pretty simple: you just have to pick your favourite piece from the whole place, the thing that’s you’d most like in your home. Don’t actually take it home, obviously. I’m not advocating Just Stop Oil behaviour here. But use your imagination.

There were some very lovely seascapes I saw on Sunday by a Scottish chap called William McTaggart, but the thing I liked most was the painting below, of two children on a riverbank with cows grazing behind them, by a painter called Edward Arthur Walton. I just thought it was an entrancing scene.

Walton was one of the Glasgow Boys. I don’t know v much about art, but these lads were apparently a group painting in the late Victorian period who rebelled against the fashion for romantic Highland scenes and beardy men striding about in tartan. Look, here’s another quite captivating one by another of the Glasgow Boys, Jules Bastien-Lepage (a confusingly French name, I’ll admit, but apparently he was still one of the Glasgow Boys).

As Mum remarked ‘he looks like he’s about to throw a brick through your window.’ Still, I liked him a lot too.

Nonsense UNBELIEVABLY EXCITING BARGAIN of the week

Technically, my new book (The Right Place) isn’t out until next Thursday (August 15th), nor is it set in Scotland so including this in my Scottish special is cheating a bit, but you’ll have to overlook that. The big news is, if you happen to have a Kindle, the clever people at Amazon have a special deal on - and you can get The Right Place on Kindle this whole month for the MADLY bargainous price of 99p. So don’t tell everyone because I know various very kind and wonderful people have ordered their hard copy to arrive next week, but if you do have a Kindle and you’re thinking ‘Oh my God next THURSDAY?? That might as well be CHRISTMAS it’s so far away!’ then please don’t panic. You can download ‘Notting Hill in Provence’ (as one friend has recently dubbed it) this very second if you so wish. Just click HERE.