Kevin McAleer's Edinburgh Diary/Week Four: Something truly shocking happened in Edinburgh yesterday, which set the whole town talking. It rained, for the first time in a month.
When I got to The Stand to do my evening slot, the publicity boards outside the venue in York Place were in a sorry state. All the press cuttings and the hot reviews of a dozen must-see shows had been washed away and were lying together in the gutter, a homogenous mass of sodden egos, five-stars mingling with three-stars, all humbled by the awesome forces of nature. I've never seen gloria mundi transit so sic.
The only man to be saved from the deluge was Cookstown bard Owen O'Neill, who was still clinging to the board with his accolades intact.
This puzzled me, because Owen isn't even on at The Stand this year. On closer inspection, I realised that his cuttings were actually an under-layer from 2005 - now there's a man with real staying power.
With Sunday's finishing line in sight, the trick now is to keep my focus, in the face of weeks of jangling nerves, sleep deprivation and self-interrogation. If I concentrate hard onstage, I can just about remember what order the words come in the sentences, which of course is the secret of comedy.
On Wednesday evening, seconds after coming off stage, I glanced at Saddam Hussein in the dressing room on the front page of the evening paper and noticed that his shirt had turned into a cat.
I am also becoming increasingly irritated by the number of helicopters that come in through my bedroom window at night and circle the light bulb, but I suppose they are only doing their job.
The other big talking point on the street, apart from the rain, is the news that the Popemobile is for sale. The 24-ton souped-up Range Rover was used by John Paul II as a highly successful PR stunt for his Edinburgh show "Fear and Loathing in Midlothian" in 1982. The Murrayfield gig was a sell-out, but John Paul split the following year when Ringo left and Lennon was assassinated, leaving the way clear for Trotsky and McCartney to compose the controversial Mull of Kintyre celebrating the Chinook disaster. The auction takes place in Dumfries on September 2nd.
Sir Sean Connery walked the red carpet at a party to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Film Festival. Sir Sean, as he is known to his friends, received a Bafta Lifetime Achievement Award for being born in Edinburgh. The former 007 is now a sprightly 0075.
One festival film which didn't make it into the limelight was Cockfighter, which was pulled when it was discovered that its many fight scenes used real cockerels, rather than stunt doubles. The US film was made in 1974 and fell foul of a law passed in 1937, which forbids cruelty to animals on screen. Owners of the Rocky franchise are now sweating, after claims that their own action sequences used real Sylvester Stallones.
Continuing the theme of lords and cockerels, Sir Mick Jagger has recovered from laryngitis in time for the Stones' gig in Glasgow. Sir Mick had to cancel 15 dates of the world tour recently, after guitarist Keith Richards suffered a head injury. Sir Keith fell out a tree in Fiji, something the pope never managed to do.
It is widely agreed by me that this year's festival awards are a travesty, due to the fact that I myself haven't even been longlisted.
The French stand-up Sir Jean-Paul Sartre famously quipped "hell is other people". Surely the worst towering inferno for a performer is to be within 100 miles of another one getting a prize. I'll get one yet, or my name's not Sir Kevin McAleer.
Let me dish out some more of my own. Best new invention by an Irish technology firm this year goes to Steorn, who claim to have devised a form of free energy which will make recharging batteries and fuelling cars a thing of the past. The invention defies the first law of physics, which states that anyone attempting to produce free energy is a terrorist and an enemy of democracy. The Bush administration has given the company 24 minutes to destroy all their stocks or face the consequences.
The Dame Penny Black award for most imaginative change to postal pricing structures goes to Royal Mail, which on Monday began to judge letters not just by weight, but by size and thickness as well. Surely it is not how big or how thick you are that counts, but what's inside? Top award however goes to the amazing city itself. A German writer (who was it?) wrote, "Sometimes for an hour, you are. The rest is what happens. Sometimes the two tides swell into a dream." Edinburgh's been a whole month of dreams.