The difference between “bumming around” in rural Wigtownshire and with comedians at the Edinburgh Fringe

Edinburgh as I left it last night, worryingly like The Exorcist

I have escaped on the last day of the Edinburgh Fringe to Wigtownshire in south west Scotland, to see if any grains of my mother’s ashes are still around. She died in 2007.

So it goes.

My mother and father grew up in Wigtownshire.

I put my mother in a little space in the rocks of the breakwater by the cottage in which she grew up, just outside the village of Garlieston.

I put her ashes above the high waterline but sometimes the sea is especially high and I thought I would leave it to Nature to decide whether to wash her ashes out to sea or not.

The Isle of Whithorn: the tide is out & so is a T-mobile signal

I am currently booked into a hotel in the Isle of Whithorn – well, the only hotel in the Isle of Whithorn – the seaside village where my father grew up. But I am posting this from the confusingly unconnected small town of Whithorn. Same name. Different places, although both share a lack of any T-mobile phone signal.

Being in parts of Wigtownshire is almost like being in the 1920s and 1930s, when my parents were growing up.

As far as I can find, there is no T-mobile cellphone reception within 20 miles, even in the town of Whithorn. And the WiFi reception at the hotel in the Isle of Whithorn is, if I am being kind, erratic.

Edinburgh is a century away and – given the narrow, winding country roads on the way here  – about 45 minutes longer than the SatNav (Oh, it will only be 3 hours and 9 minutes) told me.

Ellis and Rose last night, as both Punch and puncher

Before I left Edinburgh, I had a meal with the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show techies Misha Anker and Jorik Mol… and I bumped into Richard Rose and Gareth Ellis, who had no additional visible bodily wounds… and I belatedly saw Almond Roca: The Lost Cabaret at The Hive, which celebrated the cult of almonds.

I went to see the two-hander show because I had bumped into Adam Taffler aka Adam Oliver a couple of years ago, like one does, when I had arranged some spaghetti-juggling in the Grassmarket and he – out publicising his own show – joined in and acquitted himself as well as anyone can when juggling spaghetti.

Nancy Sanazi at the Malcolm Hardee Awards

I also went because I discovered at Friday night’s Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show that Frank Sanazi’s extraordinarily and brilliantly OTT sidekick – storm trouper Nancy Sanazi – is actually Canadian one-woman dynamo Nelly Scott who is also half of The Lost Cabaret in her guise of Zuma Puma.

Before last night’s show Adam and Nelly, dressed in their white and gold ceremonial costumes. told me that they were not going to perform their normal show. They would, they told me, just make this one up and it would be a bit low-key…

LOW KEY ???? !!!!!

Adam (left) & Nelly (right) surprised two audience members

About a third of the way through, Adam ran into the bar adjoining the venue and, as far as I am aware, simply kidnapped a poor unsuspecting girl whom he carried into the venue accompanied by about five of her friends. He ran in carrying her fireman-style over his shoulder.

The anarchy then involved a young man being enticed onto the stage with her and progressed via stripping the young man and painting his body with white paint… to human jousting, audience bouncing, marrying the two punters to each other and much chanting, climaxing with a finale in which both Adam and Nelly stripped naked and ran up and down the aisle.

The Lost Cabaret: Adam (left) and Nelly performing ‘low-key’

If this was low key, I clearly have to go out more often and stop watching re-runs of Come Dine With Me.

All I can say is that the sight of Nelly running starkers up and down the aisle waving her arms in the air and holding a giant gold-painted almond is one I will long treasure and it makes me understand why the Edinburgh Fringe is the world’s biggest and best arts festival.

Quite what the farmers of Wigtownshire would make of it, I do not know.

When I walked back to my Edinburgh flat afterwards to get my car to drive to Wigtownshire, I dropped into Bob’s Bookshop to say goodbye to Bob Slayer and his hard-working and resigned-to-oddity bar manager Cat.

She showed me an indistinct photo from the previous night’s Midnight Mayhem of a female audience member putting her finger up Bob Slayer’s bottom.

I would like to say this came as a surprise. But it has happened before.

When I arrived in Wigtownshire late this morning, before the phone signal went and the WiFi became erratic, I got what, by his standards, was an explanatory e-mail from Bob. It read:

Stompie, the Half-Naked Chef, in the window of Bob’s Bookshop – the venue of an innocent?

“A couple of years ago, I had a young girl in the audience reply to my statement that she should be shocked by my nonsense with the words: You will not shock me.

“When she laughed at the most shocking thing I could say to her, I told her I was approaching 40 and had not yet had my prostate checked.

“One thing led to another and she ended up donning a rubber glove, spitting on the finger and double knuckling me.

“In the early hours of this morning, I told this story at the end of my Midnight Mayhem show. I told the audience: That girl gave me the all clear… but I don’t think she was medically trained…

“A woman in the audience asked me if I wanted a second opinion… It turned out she was a nurse.

“There followed another live prostate examination in front of my audience and I am glad to say it was confirmed that I do have the all clear.”

I do not know what the moral is to this blog about two worlds – the Edinburgh Fringe and rural Wigtownshire.

But I suspect it says something about something.

And, for some unknown reason, the words Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire spring to mind.

Before “Star Wars” men, I dream of comic Stewart Lee in a tight-fitting suit

Slow traffic yesterday was not as fast as comic Stewart Lee.

I drove up to Edinburgh from London yesterday. It took an hour longer than normal because, between Birmingham and Preston – a distance of 95 miles – the M6 motorway was clogged and we were stopping as often and as unpredictably as the humour in a BBC3 comedy show.

The good news, though, was it took so long that even my non-technical brain realised I could plug my new iPhone into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and, by putting the iPhone in the papier mâché mounting moulded by a friend for my SatNav (after some bastard thieves nicked the original in Greenwich) I could use T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan to listen to the BBC TV News channel while driving up the motorway. To be safe – of course, officer – I only watched the screen when stuck in traffic jams.

I felt as if I had, somehow, dipped a belated toe into what would have seemed a wildly futuristic world to Jules Verne or H.G.Wells.

Which is appropriate, because I am up in Edinburgh to attend a two day event organised by the Guardian newspaper at which both Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and 20th Century Fox’s former vice president Sandy Lieberson explain “how Star Wars, a film rejected by most of the major studios, was put into production by 20th Century Fox and went on to become one of the most iconic films in the history of cinema”.

By coincidence last night, just before I went to bed, I was phoned by the late comedian Malcolm Hardee’s sister Clare. She had mis-dialled. When I told her I was in Edinburgh, she asked:

“Oh, are you up there scouting something for the Fringe?”

When I told her why I was up in Edinburgh, she said:

“Oh, me and Steve (her husband) went to Tunisia last month and saw the Star Wars sets there out in the desert… We went out into the Sahara Desert… and it rained!… Isn’t that typical?… It was lovely, though.”

I then went to bed.

For unknown reasons, I woke up several times during the night, which means I remember a dream I had. It involved Malcolm Hardee Award winning, sophisticated and intelligent comedian Stewart Lee (whose TV show was yesterday re-commissioned by BBC2 for another two series).

He was performing at the Hackney Empire in London wearing a suit several times too small for him. (Two days ago, a friend of mine complained that my trousers were too short because she could see my socks.) On stage, he looked like sexually-disgraced American comic Pee-wee Herman.

Stewart’s act involved stuffing rapidly into his mouth several ham sandwiches on brown bread then trying to speak, which simply meant he was spitting and spewing out lots of little pieces of half-eaten brown bread and ham while he told for-him unusually rapid-fire jokes.

I have seen this ‘act’ before but cannot remember who did it.

The ham sandwiches were similar to ones I had eaten on the long drive up to Edinburgh.

This goes some way to explaining the content of the dream, but possibly not far enough for comfort.