Is time running out?
and a love letter to the Edinburgh Fringe
On Saturday I stood in the middle of the Pleasance Courtyard—one of the biggest multi-venues at the Edinburgh Fringe, full of bars, picnic tables, queues of comedy seekers and piles of discarded fliers—and breathed in the heady scent of merriment. It was our last day of Fringing and I’d just bumped into Self Esteem outside the loos. It is our last August living in Scotland. We will be back for more—hopefully most years. But the feeling of something so pure and fun happening in my city: that is over. Edinburgh is magic in August. It is so busy and unruly and this year’s bin strikes have created a uniquely apocalyptic edge. But it is magic. Every outdoor surface is plastered in the posters of people who might change your life. Or least make you happy for an hour. As you squeeze through crowds of people queuing for hummus wraps you are handed fliers (smaller versions of the aforementioned posters) and told that THIS is the show you need to go and see and it starts in 10 minutes! Are you a fan of Frankie Boyle? No, not really. Okay well he’s a bit like Frankie Boyle but honestly you’re going to love him so much and also it’s 2-4-1 today so it barely matters if you hate him! Huge expanses of fake grass heave with the bodies of girls in floral dresses, children who have had too many crepes and 50 year old men who fancy themselves comedy icons of the future. The bars spill onto the streets. Dumpling and noodle restaurants come into their own. You choose a show—standup, improv, cabaret, sketch, theatre—and enter a dark shipping container full up with as many chairs as possible. It is always unbearably hot, no matter how cold and rainy it is outside. For an hour you watch what has been created, what someone has worked on for a year and hopes will break through. That The Guardian will call it ‘brimming with laughs’ or ‘urgent’. Then you return to the fray, to cold air, to order another can of Rosé, to choose what to see next.
All this to say: it is special. And on Saturday I mourned its ending and my leaving the city it happens in.
I guess I’m thinking about time in quite general terms. And why, right now, I feel like time is running out. I don’t even especially mean to introduce thoughts of the ultimate end—the final curtain. The stopped watch. More a nebulous sense that the minutes, hours, days, weeks (etc etc—we don’t have time for this) are passing and though some stuff is happening… it feels like nothing is happening.
I wrote a piece of short fiction recently about a girl who wonders every year if she is a failure for once again not being picked as one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars. ‘Fiction’. Time is our most precious commodity. As it passes it gets more precious. It is finite. Can you feel it in your body?
Summer is passing in a sweaty display of climate collapse; I haven’t written a book yet, which seems negligent.
In a novel I read recently a character in her twenties was described as ‘properly youthful, with flesh that clung to her bones, not the sort-of youth of someone in their 30s’ and I thought holy shit does my flesh not cling to my bones anymore? I grabbed a bit of it and sure enough—loose. I didn’t notice becoming someone who is not properly youthful. I was 21 yesterday. I swear. I was the youngest in the office and doing very well for myself. Now, I am not so sure.
When life is good that goodness can feel like it’s slipping through your fingers. You’re grabbing onto moments like your mum’s hand at the school gate. Please stay with me. When change is coming it stalks you until it happens. A few metres behind and you can hear it breathing. You want to yell wait, I’m not ready for you. As the years pass and you notice all the things you haven’t done and astutely ignore all the things you have, you might feel like an ageing failure. A spectator to others’ success.
There is a sick irony in not being able to enjoy a moment because you are always looking to the next thing, worrying that the next thing won’t be enough. When you reach the next thing, the cycle repeats.
That’s how it feels, anyway. Sometimes. But I also really enjoyed standing in the Pleasance Courtyard waiting for Tim, listening to the hum of noise around me, the low Scottish sun disappearing behind the grey brick building. All that will now live inside me, and in photos on my phone and Instagram. But then the next morning I woke up and felt deeply regretful that I didn’t stay out later, go to more shows. Experience more, more, more. Maybe the next thing, we think. The cycle repeats. Ad infinitum.
and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,
to be utterly
wild.
— Mary Oliver
So lovely, Claire
Oh I so enjoyed reading this and felt the same sort of sadness, regret of not having seen more now that the fringe ended. It shows one had a good time I think.