Star of the Fringe Robin Ince writes direct from the Festival. 
I have almost exhausted the local supermarkets supply of melons (Gaia), soon I fear there may be none in the market place, not even for ready money.
Each night there will be some melon punching in my show (the melon represents Vernon Kay's face, you see) and last night's melon was particularly spitty, shooting out gloops of melon pulp and juice. This meant that my jacket looked like it had been hung up to dry on the stage of the 100 Club in 1977. As I had no change of clothes, I was forced to compere the BBC Stand Up show without my normal sartorial elegance and looking morally dubious.
I am sharing a flat with radio comedy sketch trio The Consultants, this of course means that the flat is full of props, sawdust, wigs and a dressed monkey's skeleton. Unfortunately I will not be able to see their show as it clashes with mine, but the sketches I have seen them rehearse near the airing cupboard have been funny enough to make coffee come out of my nose.
My show continues to take some kind of shape and the readings from Syd Little's autobiography* combined with Philip Glass's Anthem Number One seem very popular. (*Interestingly the postage for the book was actually more expensive than the book itself.)
For some reason I have just bid on, and won, a 1976 copy of the TV Times which has Little and Large on the cover and an article by Katie Boyle about stain removal within. Why do I waste my money on such things from internet auction sites? Last year I bought a sick bag that had been used to promote Witchfinder General rip-off The Mark of the Devil. Mind you, it was in mint condition.
I have now spent 11 days in the same city as Howard Read and met him on three occasions and still I haven't had my arm broken by him. In 1999 he broke my arm, accidentally so he says, but it smacked a bit of All About Eve or Showgirls to me (that bit where Elizabeth Berkely shoves the other dancer down the stairs so that she can get the chance to come out of the volcano topless).
I had to go to accident and emergency and on that day I seemed to be the only person there who wasn't handcuffed to a policeman or whose face was held together with brawling scar tissue. I discovered that it is very hard to do stand up in a sling (people keep thinking it's all a ruse and you're going to start juggling).
Eventually I dispensed with the sling and just took all my painkillers in one go ten minutes before going on. Suffice to say, my mental state eventually became precarious.
