My first ever trip to the Edinburgh Fringe did not start well. “Major disruption is expected until at least 12.00”, the message read when I checked my Trainline app before I’d even set off. A sea of red: delayed, delayed, delayed.
Fine, I thought grimly. I’ll go to King’s Cross anyway. It’s not like I’ve paid £172 for my ticket, or anything…
That’s right: for the same price as a flight, I was heading up to the Fringe for the very first time — I just had to find some way to get there. But with so many trains cancelled on a Friday morning before one of the key weekends in the creative calendar (the second in August), things were not looking good.
Not least when you consider that when I did eventually arrive and went straight to where I was staying, it was an immediate throwback to the bad parts of the late 1990s (by which I mean the days when we used to go on a group shop to Big Tesco at three in the morning to stock up on 17p loaves of bread, cut-price potatoes and crates of Hooch that had gone off the week before). Yes — I’d paid £366 for the dubious privilege of two nights in student digs: the only option available for bad ADHD planners like me, who had left it so late to decide to come. The options were the student accommodation (a single bed in a private room with a shared bathroom), or a cubby hole in a dorm room for 24. In the latter, there were no locks on the door, because there were… no doors. Just a curtain separating your twin bed in a ‘pod’ from your neighbour (a total stranger).
Something weird must have happened to me, though (I think it’s called ‘being skint’) because I did, actually, book that dorm originally after having a mad moment of forgetting I’m a 44-year-old mother-of-two and fancying myself 18 again and in Australia on a ‘gap yah’. What in the name of ‘carve myself a didgeridoo’ was I thinking?
Read more: I won a game show, but even that wasn’t enough to cover performing at the Edinburgh Fringe
Still, the gods of basic human sense came to my rescue (sort of): the £222 I’d paid to secure my dorm ‘pod’ had sold out by the time it came for me to put in my payment details.
God, how I craved a hotel. But a hotel in Edinburgh in August for two…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…