Postcard from Edinburgh

In the beginning, there was the Pleasance. Ranged around a courtyard were venues and bars. Over the years the venues extended out and more bars sprang up. There were tables, and places to eat. It was like a little village. Then a few years ago E4 set up their Udderbelly pasture, with bars and so on. This year, the media villages were out in force, with the addition of a BBC media village and the Assembly at George Square.

The BBC are obviously fed up with paying rent to other theatres and have poached the Radio 1 roadshow outside broadcast gear, resprayed their big tent with fabreeze to get rid of the smell of roadie and teen to act as a venue, and set up on the corner of Pottersrow. The's a beer tent, toilets, and a little booth where you can be funny for thirty seconds. As it's sponsored by BBC3 it means that anyone achieving this is funnier for thirty seconds longer than any sitcom on BBC3.

The Assembly gardens was something else. On a rainy night there were actually people queuing to get in who didn't have tickets for the shows at the venues there. They simply wanted to drink in a muddy field heated only by patio heaters (meaning you are toasted one side and inviting hypothermia on the other). Possibly they had missed Glastonbury, or maybe the gloom makes it romantic, or easier to slip rohypnol into the glasses of unsuspecting women.

One thing is for sure, Edinburgh keeps going late into the night, early into the morning. When we were staggering back to the hotel at half past midnight we were weaving through people on a crowded pavement. Fair to say that most of those we were weaving our way through we're doing a fair amount of weaving themselves, but many others seemed to be taking on slices of pizza. Pizza seemed the midnight food of choice and it was very much not a last, desperate attempt to eat something solid and so avoid a mortifying hangover, but rather carb loading for the next round of revels. The demographic was wide too, because with the late show from the Tattoo emptying out at midnight, you had pensioners and partygoers wandering the pavements in search of pizza.

Busy as it was and crowded as the pavements were, it was all very good humoured. Possibly this was because in Edinburgh everyone is too preoccupied trying to get home or to the next venue and stay dry to start any trouble.