In the city that produced both the prim Miss Jean Brodie as well as the heroin junkies of Trainspotting, where it always seems to be too hot during the day and too cold during the night, and where the early houses open just as the nightclubs close, one million visiting arts groupies do daily battle throughout the month of August with the cultural beast known as the Edinburgh Fringe.
Just look at the figures: this year there are more than 8,500 performers from 36 countries performing 1,500 different shows in 189 different locations.
Just as there's never been any artistic vetting of the shows on the Fringe, similarly there has never been any behavioural vetting on the part of the people at the Fringe, The unimaginable, unpredictable and unspeakable are the order of the day or night.
Little wonder that the Guinness Books Of Records lists the Fringe not only as the "largest arts festival in the world" but also "the most rock'n'roll".
Strange things happen on the Fringe: it begins with the extreme and deteriorates. It's the sort of place where you see well-known comediennes head-butt policemen and be carted off to prison and where television presenters think taking off all their clothes and singing a medley of Abba hits is a perfectly normal way to round off a night's "socialising".
They do reserve some of the performance for the stage, though, and a glance through this year's theatre programme reveals that, besides the usual 85 different productions of Abigail's Party. There are also new plays about air-traffic controllers, pregnancy, politics, Puccini, the history of the tango, the campaign to free Israeli physicist Mordechai Vanunu, telephone dating, 17th-century career girls, sex after 70 and cyber-Catholicism.
On the music side of things, there's a techno version of Hamlet alongside the usual Gypsy, funk, Latin fusion, trance, hip-hop, bebop, garage, trad, classical, drum'n'bass, folk, Afro-Caribbean and Maori tribal chanting. Of the comedy, there's Jack Dee, Jo Brand, Eddie Izzard, Frank Skinner, Reeves and Mortimer, David Baddiel, Harry Hill, Dylan Moran, Sean Hughes, Phil Kay and Billy Connolly, and there are also full programmes of Dance (or "physical theatre" as we call it in Edinburgh), children's shows, visual art, talks and seminars. There's also a separate film festival, television festival and book festival as well as an international festival. More art than sense, if you like.
It all started 50 years ago when the Edinburgh International Festival was formed as a platform to promote peace, unity and harmony between people of different countries after the second World War. Fifty years on, participants on the Fringe interpret the "harmony between people of different countries" in a very literal way.
The first year's festival attracted so much attention that eight uninvited theatre groups turned up but, being refused a place on the official programme they put on their shows anyway. Thus the Fringe was born.
The phrase "the Fringe" was coined by a local journalist who referred to the eight unofficial theatre groups as being "round the fringe of the official festival drama". The international festival still exists, but it has long been dwarfed by the Fringe and these days contents itself with "high art" activities like opera and ballet.
The Fringe still retains its policy of never inviting anybody to perform. It simply concerns itself with giving a venue to anybody from anywhere who happens to arrive in Edinburgh during August with what could loosely be described as "a show".
The only concession to professionalism made in the early years of the Fringe was the setting up of a Festival Fringe Society, but its sole job seemed to be securing late licences in the city's pubs for the benefit of the performers.
During the 1950s and 1960s the Fringe was famous for hosting the Oxford and Cambridge revues and for discovering the likes of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Cleese, Alan Bennett, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Jonathan Miller, not to mention Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi and Donald Pleasence.
The Cambridge Footlights team, in particular, have always had a mafia-like hold on the Fringe which extended right up into the 1980s when Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery first hit the Fringe.
With Margaret Thatcher's arts cutbacks in the 1980s, the theatre side of the Fringe fell off and was replaced by the significantly cheaper "one person and a microphone" option of stand-up comedy. The introduction of the prestigious Perrier prize (still the biggest comedy prize in Europe) in 1982 underlined this trend and all today's big comedy names are either nominees or winners of the Perrier.
Ireland has won the prize a record three times thanks to Dalkey comic Ben Keaton (1985), Tallaght comic Sean Hughes (1990) and Navan comic Dylan Moran (last year). Already this year, William Hill is offering good odds on Fermanagh comic Owen O'Neill winning it for the fourth time. It's a sort of alternative Eurovision Song Contest for the Irish comics.
Despite its size and stature, the Fringe remains, thankfully, the least luvvie of any arts festival. Out of the total Fringe audience, the majority are made up of what advertisers term C1s and C2s (64 per cent) while the supposedly more artistically inclined As and Bs provide only 30 per cent of the audiences. Age-wise, the audiences are dominated by those between 25 and 35 (35 per cent) with even the 15- to 24-year-olds (32 per cent) accounting for more seats than the 36- to 44-year-olds (15 per cent).
Such a demographic profile facilitates the Fringe's manifesto (unwritten naturally) of promoting all that is radical, unorthodox, innovative and irreverent in the arts. Naturally, this policy of uncensored "art for art's sake" provokes the wrath of Edinburgh's reactionary elements.