One Man and His Fringe

It's just occurred to me that I've been telling people that I'd be performing my one man show at the Edinburgh Festival fringe this week - so I suppose I'd better post an update about that, rather than posting films of me on a beach at the other end of the country. Well, what can I say? It's all been going brilliantly, and I've been playing to packed houses. Last night I had twelve people in - which is actually over-capacity for the upstairs room at the Dropped Bollock. It was bloody lucky we didn't have a health and safety inspection, or we'd have clearly been breaking fire regulations. Anyway, I've been getting rave reviews from the local press as well: the Midlothian Free Advertiser gave me a great write up - 'Puerile smut'. That was it, just 'Puerile smut'. That's the best print review I've ever had. In fact it is the only print review I've had. Of course, I've had the professionals watching me as well. Only two nights ago I saw some bloke who'd had a gag cut from an edition of Have I Got News For You, (on the grounds that he'd stolen it from the Beano annual), in the audience. Clearly, TV beckons. Still, last night tomorrow, then it's back to the reality of trying to repair my kitchen sink.

Which, of course, I wasn't doing today, as I was in Edinburgh. Just as I didn't go to the dentist or get my car serviced. Mind you, when I talk about repairing my kitchen sink, whilst it is true that I had to install a new outlet pipe due to the old one falling apart, the most frustrating work has, so far, been an attempt to replace the taps. I feel as if I've wasted half the day under that sink, vainly trying to loosen the nuts connecting the water supply to the taps, with no success. The trouble is that there's insufficient space under the sink to properly wield any of my spanners, let alone the basin wrench. I've calculated that a smaller, six inch long, adjustable spanner might just do it, (although it still won't give me much leverage). Of course, I don't have such a tool, so operations will resume when I acquire one. Boring domestic details aside, I feel I need to say something about The Sleaze's long promised revamp. The fact is that I would have liked to have implemented the new site this week, but there were some teething problems. Most significantly, it was extremely slow loading in Internet Explorer, (all other browsers were fine). This seems to have been partially solved by updating Wordpress to the latest version. It is still slower to load than I'd like, but this seems to be an Internet Explorer problem, which is beyond my control. Anyway, fingers crossed, by early next week, the 'new' Sleaze should be up and running.