The Germs, The Rollercoaster and The Emergency Jumper.

Hello. How've you been? Your hair looks nice today. I hope it's not raining as much outside your window as it is outside mine. Well, it's not MY window, it's the window of the little flat I have been living in for a couple of weeks. It's in Edinburgh. And Edinburgh, it seems, is currently going through the Autumn to Winter changeover. It was so cold today I was instructed to bring my husband an emergency jumper. These, my friends, are chilly times. I have spent the last 2 days sneezing, as the Edinburgh germ monkey has taken me in its little tartan grip. I am sporting the ever-attractive red nose/puffy eyes/bits of soggy tissue spilling out of your handbag/olbas oil scented look that is ever so the rage north of the border once the festival hits.

Right now I am squirrelled away in a little corner of Edinburgh. This time tomorrow I will be snuggled down in Joni the beautiful orangey yellow campervan, at entirely the other end of the country. Cornwall, wonderful Cornwall. I don't care if it's raining, if it's foggy, if it's so cold I need to put on MY emergency cardigan, all I need is a little bit of peace and nature, where teenagers don't try to give me small pieces of card whilst walking like demon creatures next to me and wearing pointy shoes and singing into my face without accompaniment. I also need some vegetables. Or just ANY GREEN FOOD.

The festival has been exhausting and eye opening in equal measure. I have seen theatre that has inspired me, made me feel excited about making more work. I have seen theatre that has left me thinking a lot about the role of the audience in the telling of a story. I have seen theatre that made me incredibly proud of the man I married. I have seen one piece of theatre that made me so angry I had to take my jumper off.

It has, as always, been an emotional and financial rollercoaster. (the financial rollercoaster would just consist of one track that plummets steadily into the ground, then leaves you there, strapped in, until you manage to pedal your way out whilst screaming HELP ME to the people who pass by)

Joni the campervan has not been with us up here in Scotland. She is waiting patiently for us in Cornwall, sporting her lovely silvery jacket and full of camping accessories (including some melamine plates that I am PRETTY SURE I forgot to wash before getting the train up here. If Joni smells like a dead mackerel, or has grown mushroom clusters, then I only have myself to blame) We are flying from Edinburgh to Cornwall and I have already had to convince someone else to drive some of my luggage back for me, having bought a 1950s style peach dress with loads of netting, that is so poofy it won't actually fit into my bag. I was tempted to wear it onboard, but then decided that Mad Men chic possibly wasn't the most comfortable of choices on a plane. I was also nervous about getting the netting trapped in the moving walkways at the aiport and getting limbs ripped off, which wouldn't help with the relaxation I've got planned.

In terms of 'Running on Air' there is still some distance to go. Next stop is Falmouth, somewhere I am looking forward to immensely, not least because we are being parked really near a really good pasty shop. Lots of my husbands friends and family will be coming along and I'm excited about performing the show there, as much of the story is about Cornwall. It's somewhere I feel happy, somewhere I love to spend time and somewhere I can wear wellies all the time without judgement. I got married there, in an apocolyptic storm that was so awful it made the news.

I really can't wait to be back.

The Rhubarb, The Bra and the Eyepatch.

Now then, I only have a little while to update this today as made a to-do list earlier and there are 29 things on there. I normally put things on to-do lists that are really easy to cross off, such as 'put shoes on before going out' and that way I can feel as if I am achieving something, but this time there is no room for that kind of frivolity.

Here is the problem- I have had a week off at home. At the beginning of the week off, I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself. Since the end of April I have been all over the darn place- filling my time with a) doing shows and b) waiting for RAC mechanics on the side of various UK motorways. Every moment has been filled with the tour, and for moments that were not filled with that. there was Downton Abbey and eating cheese and crackers. It's been pretty jampacked. (Jam, as well, there has been some of that too)

When presented with a week of enforced RELAXING , well I panicked. I felt lost within the vortex of a whole 14 hours of being awake and not actually working. Here are just a selection of things that I did to fill my time:

1) I completely reorganised my underwear drawer. I re-balled my socks, folded my pyjamas and realised that I do not own enough bras. I did, however, remember that I own a horrifically bright luminous pink bra that is so harmful to the eyes I had to hide it underneath my Superman pyjama bottoms.

2) I washed my front door. This is not a euphimism.

3) I harvested all the rhubarb for the garden and made every rhubarb recipe I could think of. (Well, I say 'I'. I OBVIOUSLY MEAN Jamie Oliver. ) I made rhubarb crumble, and, um, roasted rhubarb. OK, so maybe there were only 3 recipes in the book. The other one was
'Rhubarb Bellinis, ' which, in the book, look like the most wonderful thing you could possibly drink on a summer's evening before your husband leaves for Edinburgh for a month, sipping pink blushed cocktails delicately in the garden while the sun sets behind the trees.

What I essentially made was a warm, brown fizzing 2 layered mush, not dissimilar to a drinkable lava lamp. A cocktail is less sophisticated if you have to continue whisking it with a miniature fork whilst trying to pour it into your mouth.

THANKS A LOT JAMIE.

4) I bought a new yellow blanket from a charity shop. I did this on a day that was so hot even looking at the blanket made me overheat. With hindsight, a silly idea.

5) I drank some cider out of the fridge to test whether it had gone off or not.

And so, there we are. That is how I have spent my week off. I have now realised that I leave again on Thursday morning and there is no way I am going to fit in everything that I need to do. Having spent so much time cutting up rhubarb and drinking things out of the fridge just to clear some of the shelves, I am now in a desperate scramble to get everything done. I am dealing with this by a) writing this blog which is in no way making any dent on my list of tasks and b) trying to teach the cat to clean herself after rolling in piles of dust in the garden. I think you'll agree that those are both marvellous uses of my time.

Oh, and of course, I went to the allotment. I have really missed having a little haven to hang out in and I was so excited to see what changes there have been. I am delighted to report that I had 2 of the most perfect, tasty blueberries I have ever eaten. I would have had more, but our plant hadn't actually grown any more, so 2 it was. This morning my allotment buddy and I spent an hour digging for potatoes, finding them like little nuggets of gold. It felt like digging for treasure. I am tempted to try and find my eyepatch from when I was a child to feel like a real pirate.

We also spent a long while pulling diseased leaves off the courgette plants. But there's nothing exciting about that.