Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Looking forward to it already? Are you sure? – Vladimir McTavish

As Edinburgh shivers in this late winter chill, it feels bizarre to have spent the past day or so completing the registration for my show at this year’s Fringe.

Believe it or not, tickets are now on sale. Really? Are people already planning their August nights out while still in the grip of sleet, slush and tomato rationing? It seems odd that people can buy tickets to shows that haven’t actually been written yet.

God only knows what further global catastrophes may have occurred by August, to which we comedians will have to respond. No one knows what idiots will have been elevated to positions of power above their ability, whom I will be required to ridicule. And who can predict the next item to disappear from the supermarket shelves in these post-Brexit times?

But I suppose it’s nice to have something to look forward to, such as those sunny summer days, when millions of people flock to the city, when it’s impossible to get a seat on the bus. The days when you cannot navigate a route down the High Street because of street performers, student theatre groups performing extracts from their dire musical productions, and desperate comedians handing out flyers for their shows.

We can also look forward to the return to town of the so-called “Silent Disco”, which is of course anything but silent. If you’ve never witnessed this atrocity, an annoyingly cheerful clown in dayglow clothing and sunglasses leads crowds of tone-deaf morons through the Old Town. Like a pied-piper of halfwits, he and his followers seem determined to plough through all in their path while singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” out of tune.

This crime against entertainment seems to quite often result in his entourage standing outside venues bellowing tunelessly, disrupting the shows of those aforementioned desperate comedians who have managed to attract six people to a hot attic room in the Grassmarket.

The freezing temperatures don’t sound quite so bad now, do they? I reckon, come August, many of us will be looking forward longingly to the cold, quiet days of January. Enjoy the rest of the winter, folks. Give me snow over the Silent Disco every time.