Our first full day and a morning to fill until our first booked event so we wandered over to the book festival site. We’d already checked before coming up if there were any events that coincided with our time here but sadly there were not. However, it is still an interesting place to visit and we went round the book shop and had a coffee.
Speaking of coffee we’ve had mixed visits today and oddly both were places that began with the word “Black”. First the good in the Black Medicine Coffee Co which rumour has it is half-owned by the brother of local resident JK Rowling which no doubt keeps out her detractors. It’s quirky, the food and the coffee (well tea in my case) are great and it’s well positioned. That’s a thumbs up from me.
I couldn’t, however, recommend Black Sheep Coffee which has obtuse ordering machines with no link to stock availability, had a “tea pot crisis” when we ordered three teas and presented us with dirty cups.
Street Performers
Somthing that we find ourselves doing regularly is criss crossing the city as we move from one venue to another. Often this means crossing the Royal Mile which is pedestrianised for a long stretch during the festival and packed with people with flyers, tourists and street performers.
Turns out that there is a fine line between shit and shit hot as a street performer. We saw one who I found to be middling as a performer but what really stuck in my throat was his patter which was, in the most part, about money. If anyone tried to walk away he’d shout “Don’t leave!” and try and embarrass them to stay.
Surely the best way to get people to stay would be to offer up some entertainment that people wanted rather like the drummer shown in the video below. His patter also was about money but was along the lines of “If you donate £20 you’d make me very happy. If you donate £100 I’ll come round your house and make you very happy”!
Ari and Sherlock
A lot of the shows at the Fringe are comedy related with the vast majority being stand-up or improv. However, there are also quite a few outliers that are quirky and quite magnificent – Ari, the Spirit of Korea was a great example of that. It told the traditional tale of a woodcutter who leaves his family to go to Seoul to help rebuild the Kings palace and then loses his memory in a fight and cannot find his way home. 15 years later, his daughter who was a baby when he left, travels to Seoul to find him and bring him home.
It was a colourful spectacle with dancing, singing, drumming and physical performance telling the story and throughly enjoyable.
Our second show today was Adventures of the Improvised Sherlock Holmes which pretty much tells you all you need to know about it in the title. I often wonder how much of these themed improv shows are repeated from day to day. It must be hard when you have 30 shows to come up with something original every day. Then again I can’t imagine that too many people come back multiple times so it would be easy to get away with.
In this show some parts would be easy to incorporate whatever the theme (we were asked to suggest titles for new Holmes stories before we came in). There was a running gag about Watson and a thesaurus but other parts were clearly new as other members of the cast were laughing too.
Who knows? But whatever it is one hell of a skill and I know I’m not quick witted enough to do it.