Summer Scenes #5 | Edinburgh Fringe Festival and giving myself some direction...

Wednesday 2 September 2015
















So far what this post has taught me is that it is hard to capture in photographs a festival that involves sitting in a dark room watching theatre. From looking at most of these pictures, you'd be forgiven for thinking that we just popped away to Edinburgh for the weekend, drank a lot of coffee, and got really lucky with the weather, and in many ways you'd be correct. The only difference is that coffee drinking, and sunshine were accompanied by seeing 17 amazing shows and drinking more cider than these photos suggest.

But the fringe festival is never just a jolly jaunt away for me. On the summer after our graduation I headed up to Edinburgh to work for the full month of the fringe festival at The Traverse Theatre. I was fresh out of uni, and I had no idea what I would do with my life when I returned home in September except for the vague idea of beginning an internship. That month of work and celebrations, cemented for me that I wanted to work in theatre and that I always wanted to be a part of things like the fringe festival. It left me with a destination, if not a clear set of directions, but it was more than I had had when I put down my pen on my final university paper.

For me and many of my friends, especially Lucy, the fringe festival is a really good marker for evaluating where we are and where we want to be. The last time Lucy was there she started planning moving to London, now she lives there and is totally bossing it. The last time I was there I was brand new in my job in Blackburn, and for the first time I was part of the fringe with an official lanyard. That year although it seemed a little terrifying, putting that lanyard around my neck gave me some kind of feeling of accomplishment. This year I knew not to wear my lanyard in public because a) nobody wants to be that person, and b) it marks you out as someone to bombard with flyers.

My job isn't 'new' to me any more and while I still love it, going up to Edinburgh made me revaluate some other areas of my life, and take a look at what I want to achieve before hopefully returning back up to the fringe this time next year.

On our last night in Edinburgh, my little sister, Lucy and I wrote down our goals to achieve before Edinburgh 2016. I won't tell you what they put down because those aren't my ambitions to share, but these were mine:

1. Write something new that isn't a blog post (ie. a show)
2. Get back on stage in some capacity
3. Be earning money from freelance work every month
4. Have started a savings account and paid off my credit card
5. Learn to drive

They are a real mixed bag of life and career based things, and of course that isn't all I want to do in the next 12 months, but those were the things in my life I felt needed the most direction. The things that either I need to start putting in some ground work for, or things that I've been telling myself I should do for a while but with no real accountability.

Since coming back from the fringe a fortnight a go, I have continued to make the most of the summer, but now that September is here I really want to start concentrating on these things, and now you and the thousands of people that attend the fringe can all hold me accountable!

Live life & don't let the years go by unnoticed x 


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