Beyond the Fringe?

It's that time of year again when I'm getting demob happy and counting down the days to my annual long Summer holiday. It seems to get later every year, but I always insist that it must take in at least one week of August - quite apart from the fact that I think I'm entitled to take some of my Summer break in a month classified as a Summer month, as we've previously established, I have an abiding love for August and late Summer. It's also the time of year when people start asking me what I'm going to do with my time off, where I'm going and all that other intrusive questioning, and I tell them I'm taking my one man show to the last week of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This year I'm being a bit more elaborate than usual, in that the fictitious show has a name: 'Contempt of Court', based on my 'hilarious' experiences working in the civil justice system. I've even told some people that one of the District Judges (we're talking 'proper' District Judges here, not the glorified magistrates you sometimes find in magistrates courts) I used to work with is lending me his spare wig and gown.

As ever, nobody I tell really knows whether to believe me or not. Which is the way I like it. I've never understood why people always seem to have such a fascination with what their colleagues do when they're on holiday. Personally, I don't think that I've ever asked anyone where they're going on holiday. Frankly, I don't care. Obviously, I hope they do something they enjoy, but the details really are of no interest to me whatsoever. I feel much the same way about any other non-work aspects of their lives - it's none of my business what people do outside of the workplace. I suspect that much of this interest emanates from the idea that everybody else is leading a more interesting life than you - people want to believe that life really isn't as mundane as their own seems, they need to believe that there are more exciting lives to live out there somewhere. Sadly, I learned a long time ago that the majority of lives are pretty mundane and uneventful. Which doesn't mean they are uninteresting, just not that they aren't the way the media tells us they should be. However, the less people know about your private life, the more exciting they imagine it to be. So, by playing out this fantasy about the Edinburgh Festival every year, I like to think that I'm enriching my colleagues' lives and reassuring them that there really are more exciting lifestyles to aspire to.

Obviously, the whole lie will fall apart when someone spots me drinking in my local pub when I'm supposedly at the other end of the country, entertaining a bunch of students. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Some years ago I told some acquaintances that I was going to Tibet for two weeks. It took some fast thinking to explain how come I'd been seen in a local supermarket and several pubs during this period. "Have you never heard of Tulpas?" I asked. "The thought forms some Tibetan monks are believed to be able to project that are indistinguishable from the real individual or object they are based on? Well, it just happens that I spent my Tibetan holiday in a monastery, studying with a group of Buddhist monks..." Anyway, for anyone interested, I'll be performing 'Contempt of Court' in the assembly rooms above the 'Dropped Bollock' in Nipple Lane, Edinburgh between 22-26 August. Tickets available in the saloon bar.