Let the Fringe Fest. Begin

Yesterday saw the beginnings of my desperate attempt to throw off the trappings of domesticity and embrace the theatrical and comedic madness that is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Things didn’t get off to the best start as running late, I attempted to load the guinea pigs in the dishwasher, feed the dirty dishes some breakfast, put my 17 year old No.1 Son out on the washing line and get the laundry out of bed...

Things didn’t improve as I arrived at the venue, somewhat flustered, to find that there had been a mix up and my name wasn’t down, so I wasn’t getting in!  

No.1 Son was now a-grumbling at his lack of breakfast, but my attempted to pacify him by buying two sausage rolls (for the benefit of our southern friends, that’s a sausage in a roll, and not the pastryfied bakery good you may have been thinking of), went pear shaped as I chose the take-away unwisely and the rolls got binned due to in-edibleness.  That didn’t improve the mood, so we headed back home show-less and down £15.00 on bus fares and sausages!  

Thankfully, things did pick up at the Assembly Rooms later that night.  JW and I were booked in to see One Day in the Life of Lloyd Owen Langford.  Having never heard of Lloyd before, I was half expecting the usual “is there anyone in from Cardiff tonight?!” malarkey.  But, joy of joys, Lloyd was actually going to tell us a story, and a rather funny one at that, about a trip to the shops to buy some bread.  Now, that perhaps doesn’t sound like the most inspirational of occurrences, but when I tell you that Lloyd’s landlord is none other than the duvet buying welsh comic Rhodri Gilbert, you might be persuaded to hang around a bit to listen.  

Lloyd’s gentle and humourous storytelling manner means that you would happily listen to escapades involving text messages and dog doings all day.  When we finally got to the point where the bread was at last purchased, the audience were desperate to know more, “what kind of bread was it?” they asked, “did you enjoy it?”, they were clamouring to know.

I’ll never listen to Delilah by Tom Jones in the same light again...  Go see before he sells out!