This was our second Edinburgh Fringe at Nectar, and it looked almost nothing like the first. Nectar's birthday falls on 1 August, which means our first Fringe and our first year of existing at all began in the same breath. That timing made last year genuinely hectic in a way I don't think we fully appreciated until we had a second Fringe to compare it against. We opened at lunchtime and stayed open until 1am, every single day, convinced we had the energy and the capacity to s

There is a version of Edinburgh that exists in photographs and travel guides. The castle silhouetted against a brooding sky. The Royal Mile in full tourist flow. Arthur's Seat at sunrise. These things are real and they are genuinely worth experiencing. But the Edinburgh that the people who live here love is something slightly different: the city that appears in June when the days get long, in July when the terraces fill up and the light stays until nearly eleven at night, and

Every August, Edinburgh becomes a different city. The population roughly doubles. Every spare room in a ten-mile radius is rented out to a comedian, a theatre troupe, or a solo performer who has been working on their show for two years and is quietly terrified. The Royal Mile turns into a parade of flyering, shouting, singing and general theatrical desperation. Cowgate stays open until four in the morning. And scattered across every church hall, basement, converted car park a