The Edinburgh Fringe Festival: the city is full of glassy-eyed narcissists eating haggis pizza off flyers that say Michael Gove: Prick. I saw the Grim Reaper in the Pleasance Courtyard, of all places. Even Death likes an audience these days, has a media strategy, an agent, a gimmick. But this is not a review of comics — mating habits and most likely mental illnesses or ‘conditions’, plus hats — disguised as a review of the food that comics eat. All comics are mad. You know this. They live on self-hatred and Smarties, when they can afford them.
Instead, I go to Rhubarb. Rhubarb is the sister restaurant to the Witchery by the Castle on the Royal Mile. The Witchery is blood and glitter formed into the shape of a restaurant that specialises in steak and, upstairs in the hotel, deviant sex; there are no witches here any more, of course, the witches all being employed writing feminist blogs.
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