Surviving the Fringe (part two), by Carl Donnelly

If you would have asked me last week “what would you like your first 24 hours at the Edinburgh festival to be like?” I can’t be sure what my response would have been. However, I am quite confident it would not have been “I’d like to come down with suspected swine flu and then damage the rental vehicle I drove to Edinburgh in causing me to lose my deposit”.

Unfortunately, this is exactly how my Fringe began. On the eve of my departure, I suddenly found myself with flu-like symptoms (with a few bonus symptoms thrown in for good measure). Not to let a little thing like a deadly virus slow me down, I continued with my planned journey which included me collecting a hire car, filling it up with enough provisions for a month, picking up Chris Martin and Benny Boot, and heading north of the border.

The eight-and-a-half hour journey went without incident and we arrived outside our home for the month, at which point Chris stepped out of the car leaving the door open forgetting about the famous “Edinburgh Winds”. As if in slow motion, the wind caught the door, swinging it wildly into a lamp-post. The three of us stared at the dent for about five minutes, not speaking, still in a state of shock that we had got the car here in one piece following a 430 mile drive from South London, only to be undone by the lamp-post outside our lodgings.

Finally we agreed to get our stuff into the flat and work out our plan from there. We moved all of our bags in and I jumped back into the car to find a more suitable parking space.

I saw a parking space at the end of the road so turned into it, suddenly hearing a crunching noise. Looking forward I saw an elderly woman on the pavement shaking her head. I stepped out and before I even got around the car she said loudly “You've messed your wheel right up there!” I got to the wheel to see I had smashed the wheel trim on the curb.

A tense evening of sneezing and self-hatred was followed by an early morning trip to the car rental depot where, having told them what had happened, they not surprisingly worked out I was a comedian up for the festival. My offer of complimentary tickets did not sway them in letting me off paying for the damage.
On the plus side, I don’t have swine flu, just a regular cold, so this festival is officially looking up.

Carl Donnelly’s show Relax Everyone, It’s Carl Donnelly! is at the Underbelly, 9:05pm, until 30 August.