Hot on the heels of a very wet walk home from Silent Disco, Kathy and I headed for Waverley station to catch the first of two trains which would deliver us eventually to Oban, in the west Highlands, for a week of relaxation.

We’re staying in the Glenbervie Guest House, which I would recommend without hesitation.  It’s a beautifully kept house with a very warm welcome from Iain and Joan and breakfast is delicious.

It has been wonderful for Kathy and I to be able to spend time together without the worries of work or decorating or housework getting in the way.  This is our first decent-length holiday together and it has been incredible fun - whether walking together along the coast, taking a boat ride to the islands or sitting on the bed watching episodes of Doctor Who (Kathy has been poorly the past couple of days so the outdoor activities have had to be curtailed a little).

Aside from the guest house, a couple of suggestions if you ever find yourself in Oban:

• The Kitchen Garden is a wonderful delicatessen and coffee shop with awesome pies and a great cheese selection.
• The Cuan Mor is our favourite restaurant, beautifully decorated with local materials and serving incredibly tasty meals.

We return home on Saturday (exciting in itself just for the length of time we get to spend on trains) but we’ve got something awesome planned for tomorrow before we leave…

The week in Edinburgh was one of the best.  There seemed to be a lot of fresh talent coming through and I saw probably more shows than I have in any previous year.  Some more very brief reviews below:

Tim Vine - Punslinger ***
Exactly what you want (and expect) from Vine - lots of puns, well executed
John Gordillo - Divide and Conga **
Unusual show about politics and his father - brilliant in flashes but patchy
Honourable Men of Art ****
Extremely good (and completely different) on our second view - definitely one to catch
Isy Suttie **
Funny, enthusiastic and likable except when doing her characters (which made up about half the show)
Only The Brave ****
Amazing new musical with a phenomenal script and songs, only let down by an average cast and some technical problems
David O’Doherty ****
Excellent show from start to finish - noticeably sharper than last year
Bad Film Club ***
We watched Roadhouse and the banter was excellent
Dean Hagland - X Files Improv ***
Nice concept which worked surprisingly well through a whole hour
Alex Horne - Wordwatching ***
Good concept from a clever man (with nice AV trickery) though would benefit from a few more jokes
66a Church Road ****
Genuinely delightful storytelling from Kitson, though lacked a little of the poignancy of some of his other story shows
Silent Disco **
Still a good concept, but I preferred it last year when there were fewer annoying people

We’re about half way through the Edinburgh trip this year, so time for a round-up of the stuff that I’ve seen so far (in the order in which I saw it):

Andrew Maxwell’s Supernatural ***
Very funny (if a bit short) show
Political Animal **
Good concept but slightly lacklustre guests when we saw it
Andy Zaltzman **
Decent enough show but could do with more big laughs
Richard Herring ***
Enjoyable show which seemed to run out of steam a bit at the end
Josie Long ****
Fantastic fun but still slightly ragged at this early stage of the fringe
Honourable Men of Art ****
Awesome banter which ended with a triple jump competition
Not Everything is Significant ****
Excellent and thoughtful story show, crammed full of jokes
Terry Saunders ***
Decent enough story show but nothing special
Jon Richardson ****
Spot-on comedy, effortlessly delivered
Collings and Herrin ***
Enjoyable morning podcast recording
Matt Forde’s On Heat ***
Amusingly ramshackle panel show
Pappy’s Fun Club *****
Utterly awesome themed sketch show which put me in mind of Population 3; my pick of the fringe so far
Mark Watson ****
Very, very good hour of comedy from the likable comedian
Danielle Ward ***
Extremely slick and funny set delivered to (sadly) a small audience in the Pleasance Attic

Hello.  I won’t try and summarise all of the last year other than to say that it’s been largely awesome.

I’m currently sitting in a flat in Edinburgh, listening to Duke Special and watching the rain pound down outside.  After the stresses of the last couple of months (mostly related to work and decorating) it feels amazing to have a holiday.  Our annual trips to the Fringe are usually frantic, trying to cram in as many shows as possible, but there are also plenty of pockets of pure calm and this is one of those.

OK, so I should probably list at least a few of the significant things that happened to me in the last year before I descend into the usual list of Edinburgh recommendations.

- I got two new Apple computers (MacBook Pro and Mini) and an iPhone 3G
- I got promoted
- I got engaged

Not necessarily in that order.

Seriously, though, getting engaged to Kathy is the most incredible thing that has happened in my life so far.  The iPhone only barely scrapes into the top 10.

I saw this at lunchtime. It’s still making me laugh now. Behold, the funniest ever Dinosaur Comics (and that’s saying something).

Oh, and I have some things to say about San Francisco but I’m probably waiting until I get bandwidth to upload photos and time to type on keyboards.

In the last couple of days in Montreal we went to see Freestyle Love Supreme again (since they were so awesome), visited the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the science museum, saw some extreme biking and a skateboarding competition and watched Family Guy Live.

It was impressive to see Freestyle Love Supreme take an entirely different set of prompts from the audience and create an equally funny yet totally different show from the first time we saw them. They are incredibly quick and very funny and likeable. They seem to have a New York residency at the moment (check www.freestylelovesupreme.com for details.

Friday in Montreal was pretty rainy so we headed down to the Montreal Science Centre for the morning and went round the Body Worlds 2 exhibition. This is the exhibition which has toured around the world which shows how the body fits together using real (donated) corpses. I was a little apprehensive about visiting because of the various accusations which have been made against Gunther von Hagens (the exhibition’s developer) including those that not all of the bodies were donated by informed consent. Having said that, I did find the exhibition interesting although it was also somewhat disquieting and creepy. The bodies are positioned in active poses, some of which border on the grotesque, but the more mundane cases showing the sizes of various organs and some of the effects of disease were genuinely informative.

The Just For Laughs festival seems to include, for some reason, a bunch of “urban activities” such as skateboarding, biking, parcours and breakdancing. Despite the general lack of information about when and where these activities would take place, we managed to track down the biking and skateboarding in the heat of Saturday afternoon. The mountain bikers used precision control to bounce between tiny blocks and bunny hop along thin plans of wood. The strength and timing needed to pull these stunts off was incredible and we were suitably impressed by the two riders.

Meanwhile, a bunch of people were still building the skateboarding course, set on a steep hill. For reasons best known to them they had decided to construct the whole thing from scratch about an hour before the competition started and so there was sawing of wood, banging of nails and hasty last-minute addition of safety features to the big ramp (some extra bits of wood on the side to stop skateboards flying out into the crowd). The riders gathered and practised, showing more skill than I had expected. There were jumps over barriers, grinding down rails and a big ramp at the end for more spectacular tricks. Amazingly, a 9-year old kid was amongst the best of the riders and earned a lot of respect from the commentator (who was speaking mostly in French but would then switch to English to shout “that’s gotta hurt!” or “do your job!”, which was most amusing).

The Montreal experience came to an end with a final show - Family Guy Live. The whole cast gathered to do a script read-through live for us then perform some songs from the show and answer questions from the audience. We also got to see footage from the first episode of the next season (the Star Wars episode) which looks pretty awesome. It was actually quite thrilling to see this bunch of people create the voices which I associate with the animated characters and particularly incredible to watch Seth MacFarlane switch between the four main characters which he voices. The cast were generous with their time and answered lots of questions, even if lots of them were just “can I have your copy of the script?”.

We headed back from the show to get a few hours of sleep before jetting off to San Francisco…

On Wednesday we set out to explore the eastern side of the city, taking in the Biodome (which, like the Biosphere, failed to go into lockdown at any point), the Insectorium and the botanical gardens.  It was the hottest day so far of our trip which made it somewhat hard to concentrate within the more tropical parts of the Biodome but everything was well-presented and the model animals within the centre-piece “fatal attraction” exhibit certainly appeared to be anatomically correct.

The Insectorium was quite impressive, with lots of facts and figures as well as examples of all sorts of enormous beetles, scorpions and stick-insects.  Apparently there was an awesome 4-stage diorama showing a fight between a tarantual and a wasp which I missed, but luckily The Mark was able to recreate it as a monologue for us (video to follow).  The botancial gardens were well-presented, but it was really too warm for us to linger too long in them.

We retired to a specialist tea cafe, where I had a pot of remarkably refreshing Sun Moon Lake.  Dave had some mint tea, whilst Mark opted (”oui!”) for a bowl of suspiciously thick, gloopy, bright green tea which he was instructed to drink in three and half sips.  Upon finishing it, he was also told to concentrate on the effect it was having on his body.  The main effect seemed to be making him want to drink cocktails, so we went and did that for a while in a friendly little bar before heading off to see Kids In The Hall.

Not having seen them before, it took me about ten or fifteen minutes to get “into” KITH, but once I did I really enjoyed the show.  Surreal, Pythnoesque in places with hatfuls of ideas and an excellent way with words, most of the sketches were highly enjoyable with only the occasional miss thrown into the mix.  More DVDs for me to add to the stack at some point, I suspect…

Montreal’s main chain stores can all be found underground, clustered around the metro stations.  This is initially hugely confusing and, for some reason, none of it is really signed from above ground in anything more than a cursory fashion.  But I’ve grown to enjoy the way that these little multi-level shopping centres link together a bit like different zones in Quake.  In face, it’s almost a disappointment when you walk through a set of connecting doors and a sign *doesn’t* come up saying “Loading…” and there’s no momentary drop in frame-rate.

I guess the shops are underground so as to present a pleasant experience during the harsh winters that Montreal experiences, but they are also particularly nice air-conditioned oases from the heat of the summer sun.  We wandered around some on Tuesday and failed to buy anything except lunch (my lunch came from Mmmuffins, who really ought to team up with Midland Mainline’s Mmms Bar).

In the evening we went to see Britcom - The Best Of British Comedy.  Unfortunately, the line-up had changed and of the three Brits we were particularly looking forward to - Richard Herring, Frankie Boyle and Russell Brand - only Herring was there.  He was good, as always, but the rest of the line-up - Wes Packer, John Moloney, Michael McIntyre, Frank Skinner, Sean Meo and Stephen K Amos compering - failed to raise many chuckles from me or (in most cases) from the rest of the crowd.

Our Monday in Montreal was spent checking out the biosphere (not to be confused with the biodome but, seriously, what kind of city has both a biosphere AND a biodome anyway?  An AWESOME one is what.  Although it would have been better if one of them at least had gone into “lockdown”).  Originally the US pavilion in the 1967 World Fair, this unusual sphere was refurbished in the mid-90s and is now home to educational science exhibits, photos and some great views of the city.

The biosphere is on one of a pair of islands, the other of which is possibly one of the weirdest places I’ve been to.  Much of it is man-made (including a beach) and it’s the venue for the Montreal Grand Prix each year (you can cycle or drive around much of the track).  There’s definitely a feeling of creepiness surrounding the place, though, and we didn’t stay long.

We thought we’d watch the Transformers movie (knowing that, even if it was terrible, it would be very amusing to watch it with Transformers superfan Mark).  It was terrible and it was very amusing to watch it with Mark.  I won’t go into the details (listen out for the Russ B Film Review Segment on a future Certificate PG) but I think it’s important that you know it was really, really bad.  My favourite moment of the evening, though, came when, already a couple of beers down and still dissecting the film, Mark lifted his glass and uttered the phrase “Y’know, though, Megatron does have a good point…”

We started Sunday by heading down to the bottom of the hill which we had climbed on Saturday, lying down on the grass and watching as a phalanx of drummers, dancers and assorted other musicians grew in volume (correct scientific usage) and in volume (casual, sloppy usage).  It is hard to think of a more relaxing way of spending a Sunday morning than dozing between chapters of a good book in the warm sun with the sound of the tam-tam players washing over you.

Something altogether less relaxing was having a naked, sweating Phil Nichol standing on the, previously unoccupied, chair to my right in the tiny St. Catherine’s Theatre.  Phil, you see, is the Naked Racist and his latest show explores his pacifism and tells the true story of his short trip to Amsterdam after splitting up with his girlfriend.  How he ends up naked I shan’t spoil (but, be warned, he does); I think it’s fair to say that it’s a very entertaining and, as always with Nichol, a very intense show.  His parents were in the audience for the performance which we went to see, which perhaps distracted him slightly, but it was nevertheless most enjoyable.  Also, he licked my head (Pat - I think this makes us even).