because harry had a show in the edinburgh festival free fringe i decided to take a few days off work, head up and surprise him by showing up and enjoy some of the festival while there. his show was wonderful – delivered with a lot of confidence and a lot of laughs and an hour whizzed by. it’s weird to think that a year ago he only really had two proper poems. i remember when he said he was going to do a gap year focused on poetry wondering how that was going to work but it’s been an amazing year and brilliant to watch… if you are in edinburgh next week his show is back on from mon to thurs.

if you’ve not been to edinburgh festival there is an astonishing amount on in all sorts of arts. there’s the official festival, the fringe festival (paid gigs but relatively cheap), the edinburgh art festival (more about in another post), and the free fringe. when you arrive there are so many programmes to pick up it’s really quite overwhelming the amount of choice at any one time. and events run in virtually any available space. lots of the free fringe events are in small rooms in basements or the back of pubs like the one harry is in here which seats around 30 people.

[update: since i wrote this entry harry has retained his title in the edinburgh fringe poetry slam winnng for the second year in a row – congrats! and how about this for a wonderful five star review of his show by what’s on stage]