The weekend just gone felt like the first step on the possibly treacherous path to the Edinburgh Fringe. Robin Ince’s Book Club has played the Latitude Festival since it began in 2006 and to me our annual gigs in the Suffolk countryside have a stepping stone-like quality to them. There are photos on Flickr taken two years ago of me reading from Jodie Marsh’s triumphant oeuvre Keeping It Real which I then used in my 2006 Edinburgh show Everybody Hates Chris (Neill).
This year someone I noticed in the audience took snapshots (I’ve no reason to assume Flickr-bound at all) of me while I was reading out from various ridiculous cookbooks which I shall be referring to in this year’s show Chris Neill’s Got A Bun In The Oven (Assembly Rooms from 5th August.) 282 Ways With Salad anyone?
Every year I go to the Edinburgh Festival with, not only the hope that the month won’t be utterly hateful and bankrupting, but that also I’ll do useful things with my acres of spare time. This hasn’t ever happened in the past. My pie in the sky plans for 2008 include completing a teach-yourself-Italian course, and, even more impressively I feel, to remember to blog at least once a day so as to make up for the eons of time that normally occur between postings. I’m not putting money on it.
I think I met you in the street in Edinburgh in 2002, handsome in a checky suit.
Ah, happy memory! (Real, or imagined)