First preview down (Mission Drift @ Traverse till the 14th – see it). Tired and reluctant, I’m beginning to engage with the festival excitement and the prospect of little sleep, incumbent intake of cholesterol-laden take-aways and this month’s salary being pissed down the gutter of a bar that’ll charge me four pounds per pint, of which I’ll no doubt have many.

This year, I’m abandoning spontaneity. I’m going to have to plan meticulously what I can fit in on days off work. I’m going to be organised, scan the brochure (well, it’s about time really) and book some tickets. Here goes.

Is the theatre section getting smaller, or am I getting bigger? (At a steady 5’4” since the age of 14, the latter is unlikely.) The Comedy Festival – the Macbeth of Edinburgh – is slowly infiltrating the Fringe programme, and the possibility that one day it might usurp it is alarming. Out, out damned spot, I say!

It’s not that I don’t like a giggle/chucke/hearty laugh from time to time, but I’m not convinced that things aren’t just theatre that’s a bit funny, rather than it actually being comedy. Is theatre not allowed to be funny? I suspect that with a foray of awards and countless opportunities to follow in the footsteps of Edinburgh’s impressive alumni of comics, funding and promoting the next Michael McIntyre is a more sound financial investment than encouraging a bunch of Gleeks-come-Shakespeare wannabes make a success of their new “innovative” and “rejuvenated” interpretation of a classic.

Unless, of course, you’ve got a slot at the Traverse. The trouble with the Trav is less the productions on, and more the select few audience members who look through no other listings but those. What is the Fringe, I ask, if you’ve not stayed out too late in a basement somewhere watching atrocious German cabaret by accident? It’s going to specific events to be seen and say you’ve seen that thing you saw. (And yet, playing a game of ‘who’s who’ in the Trav bar at any point during the festival is a done, and meagrely gratifying, thing).

Yet, elitism sells. It’s aspirational. Alternative is the new mainstream. And mainstream sells if you call it ‘innovative’. The constantly expanding commercially driven venues have been clever. They’ve managed to convince us that the good stuff is all on there. Actually, they have an equally good: crap ratio as everywhere else. It’s a bit of a mind over matter thing.

The most worthwhile aspiration should be to get your work seen, or to see something that might –heaven forbid I use the phrase – change your life. It’s an artist’s Mecca. And the best thing is that you might find it in the corner of a venue you won’t know exists until you’re in it.

Brochure is closed; budget in the bin and I’m just going to do it. I’d jump in at the shallow end if there was one, but year after year I’m reminded that there’s no such thing. Here goes (again).