Sorry, this is another post that isn’t about games. But stick around – you might enjoy it anyway!

So, the reason it’s been a little quiet around here is because I’ve been on holiday. Not one of those fancy holidays where you go somewhere sunny and sit by a pool drinking booze from breakfast ’till bedtime, but a (to use a horrible term that I will never type again) “staycation”.

The plan for the first week was to spend a week travelling up the West coast of Scotland, starting in Edinburgh where we live, and taking in Fort William, Plockton, Applecross, Torridon, Inverewe, and Ullapool (with sightseeing stops in between). We’d then cross back to the East coast, down to Inverness and spend a couple of days exploring that area.

It was a great holiday, very relaxing despite the relatively large amount of travelling. Seeing new places constantly meant that by the end we felt that we’d done much more than a week.

For friends, there are a load of photos on my Facebook page. For the rest of you unwashed random strangers, you’ll just have to make do with the handful I have put on Flickr.

The second week was back to Edinburgh, to take in the sights and sounds of the famous Fringe.

Now, despite being in a relationship with an Edinburgh girl for over ten years, I’ve never been during the festival before. I think I always assumed it would be packed full of tourists, and fairly horrible because of it. I was right and wrong. The Fringe is absolutely amazing, and I was a fucking idiot for not coming sooner.

I mean really, where else are you going to wander around and see this sort of thing, every day for a month?

As well as taking in the street performances and general goings on, I ended up seeing 25 shows over the month, which I’m told is possibly being a little over eager. Oh well! I won’t bore you with them all, but some high (and low) lights were…

• Rob Rouse was the first show we saw, and we weren’t let down. We had seen him touring his show from last year recently, and there was a little bit of overlap, but his performance was energetic enough that we didn’t care.
• I’ve never seen Tom Binns’ hospital radio DJ character Ivan Brackenbury before, and this was apparently a “best of” compilation of his previous sets. Although it is essentially one joke repeated for an hour, it is a good joke, and very well done. Tom also had a new act this year – a psychic called Ian D. Montfort. Unfortunately it was sold out every day we were free.
• Nick Helm was possibly the best thing I went to see. An extremely energetic (and slightly aggressive) musical comedy act that had the whole audience in stitches (even the poor girl that he focussed his attention on).
• The Boy with Tape on His Face was getting a lot of attention, and it was certainly interesting. Essentially a mime act where a range of props (including audience members) are combined in unexpected ways. Worth catching.
• One of the few more theatrical shows I went to see was Mike Wozniak and Henry Paker’s “The Golden Lizard”. A bizarre ‘boys own’ adventure play, interspersed with new takes on scientific ideas (such as a new numeracy system, or a way to discover the average name of a room full of people). Both actors played the various characters interchangeably, which sounds confusing but was very easy to follow. I also saw Mike in Alex Horne’s Taskmaster, and am now a big fan.
• Stewart Lee’s Vegetable Stew was pretty much exactly what I expected from him – good stuff.
• Goring & Stokes had been recommended to me by another game developer, and if you’re reading this blog you’ll almost certainly enjoy their two individual pieces of stand up on the theme of being huge nerds.
• And finally, the low-light of the Fringe for me – Rhod Gilbert is famous for doing a routine about the confusion caused when buying a duvet. He seems to have decided now that he wants to stick with that, so has done a version about buying a vacuum cleaner, and also one about using a washing machine. That’ll teach me for trying to “play it safe” and buy tickets for a big name act.

To sum it up – the Fringe is great, and if you’re at all able to you should really come up here and see it for yourself. Maybe I will bump into you next year?