Leaving in London in sunshine… and arriving in Edinburgh in the rain (of course)….

With that in mind, I nowadays limit my slice to five nights. But even that, I worried, is five nights too many, because this festival has always struck me as the ultimate triumph of hope over experience, on both sides of the equation: the hope of discovery and success for the 13,000+ performers, and the hope of making discoveries for audiences amongst the 2000+ shows that are being put on; but the experience is invariably very different, and it’s inevitable - and entirely right — that most actors are going to remain undiscovered, and most of their shows are going to be merely mediocre.

Yet human nature being what it is - and not, of course, wanting to miss out on the party, even if I probably end up at all the wrong ones - hope won out, and I put myself on that train yet again yesterday and headed north. This was the first year I was making the trip on a National Express train, but since they seem to simply be the old GNER stock with repainted logos, I felt on familiar territory. And as the train lumbered into Edinburgh nearly four and a half hours later - longer, even than a Trevor Nunn production, though with better scenery along the way - I definitely felt a homecoming, of sorts: it was, of course, raining heavily when I arrived. And didn’t stop all day or evening.

There’s nothing like bad weather to put a dampener, in every sense, on the fringe; but - with a sense of yet more hope over experience - the leafleteers were nevertheless out in force everywhere I went, even if they constantly hid for shelter in doorways and awnings and only sprang out as people approached. “Where did you come from?”, I heard one astonished member of the public ask one in Bristo Square. But even if one has to ask if leafleting is really the best way to market shows in such a crowded marketplace - do people really take those leaflets and make their decisions, beyond one to put them in the bin as soon as possible, based on them? — desperate times require desperate measures, and many weren’t just offering leaflets but free tickets, too. Outside the Gilded Balloon, someone was offering tickets for a show there last night.

There’s more sense in that, of course, since the best form of marketing is trying to create word-of-mouth - and you need people to actually see the show to do that. Yesterday I got an e-mail while I was still on the train (GNER offer an intermittent wireless internet service) recommending Lynn Ferguson at the Gilded Balloon; and no sooner did I arrive than Fiona Mountford from the Evening Standard was texting me - another kind of word-of-mouth, namely that I was in town, had reached her - to let me know: “My tip du jour — Paperweight at the Assembly Rooms”. And, in what has to be festival’s biggest growth industry, there are now armies of PR officers all over town, all of whom come with clients and recommendations of their own. It’s hard to keep your head straight when all about you others are doing their best to keep it spinning.

At the end of one show I saw last night away from the main beat of the megavenues that dominate the fringe, the performer concerned stepped forward to thank us personally for choosing his show from the thousands there are to choose from, and implored us to tell our friends if we enjoyed it - “It’s the only reliable way to sell a show”, he told us, with gentle understatement. And with full-price tickets at just £6, it’s one that might just be worth audiences taking a chance on, so I’m going to answer his plea and direct you to Bremner Duthie’s earnest and intense solo Kurt Weill cabaret, Whiskey Bars, being performed in the Vault, a venue located a tiny cul-de-sac below George IV Bridge, just off Candlemaker’s Row. Though it’s very centrally located, it’s a fringe feat to actually find the place, so I proudly gave myself brownie points for that, too. (Another reason why the big venues dominate is presumably the fact that audiences at least get to know where they are!)

But if the small venues are always going to struggle to compete with the marketing might and presence of places like the Pleasance, Assembly Rooms, Gilded Balloon and now the Underbelly (who have joined forces collectively not only to create their own unwieldly newspaper-like brochure this year, but also to re-brand one half of it as a separate “Comedy Festival” within the fringe), shows at those big venues have to pay much larger rents - and therefore charge much higher ticket prices. Plays at Assembly are, astonishingly, going at up to £20 a ticket; no wonder that the one I saw there in the Music Hall yesterday, Surviving Spike with one troubled comic, Michael Barrymore, playing another, Spike Milligan, was probably only a quarter filled.

Once again, it is word-of-mouth that is needed; and yesterday, I got an urgent text from a friend asking for mine: “Do you have any tips as we are having a dire time?”