Entering Edinburgh

It seems strange to be writing about entering Edinburgh in August when I live here, but as soon as that baleful and beautiful month arrived I was heading into deepest, darkest Wales for a wedding. To Lampeter, to be precise, a university town that shares a great deal of properties with Brig-a-doon - not least of which that it is incredibly hard to get in and out of.

So my first real blog about the festival is going to be what it is like to journey to it from the middle of rural Wales. The first challenge was, of course, the rural Welsh bus service - a service that happens seemingly at random. This challenge was overcome by simply sitting at the right bus stop (once we found the right bus stop) and waiting for a bus. The times given on the timetables might as well have been the Tibetan Book of the Dead translated into Aramaic for all the sense I could make of them.

From there we stopped at Carmarthen where an over-priced train ticket brought us into Cardiff. Cardiff is a city as modern as Edinburgh is ancient. Looking at its gleaming structures, it would be difficult to believe that anyone lived there any earlier than 1901 were it not for a bloody great castle sat in its centre.

My partner, The Moose, and I had booked overnight tickets on a Megabus to get back to Scotland so we had some time to kill in Cardiff. As we had cases to drag seeing the sights was not an option, but we met up with an old friend in a chain Irish theme pub and caught up over drinks. He has taken up Cex-work and it seems to have treated him well, at any rate he can wear his hair at a length of his choosing which is an important factor in job satisfaction (supermarkets take note).

It was at this point that I expected the journey to become a nightmare. A megabus, even if it was titled, 'Megabus Gold' is hardly the epitome of luxury travel and getting into Edinburgh in August must be hellish right? As it turns out, not at all. Getting into the bus was not without incident - an Indian gentlemen came up to me and aggressively mumbled something about Glasgow before having his bags full of contraband booze (none allowed on the coach) taken away by an irate driver - but the bus itself was laid out in beds and the two of us could sleep.

My only complaint was that the bed above was so low it definitely gave me the impression of being taken to Glasgow in a coffin - which for a long time was the only way I could conceive of ever going there. Perhaps the nightmare element was present after all, but it was a subtle kind of creeping horror rather than balls-to-the-wall, blood, guts and phenylalanine kind of horror. Also we got a free muffin, which helped to dispel the coffin illusion.

In Glasgow getting a ticket and a bus to Edinburgh proved easy and the bus itself quite empty, though I did manage to improve the journey by throwing some cream crackers everywhere.

Therefore my advice for those travelling into Edinburgh for the fringe is this : get in early, beat the crowds and - of you can - hire your own hearse and coffin, so that you can snore in peace on the way.