Auld Reekie

Down a dark, dark street, in a dark, dark pub, there's an even darker basement where Scottish ghosts go to drink the night away. If you're brave enough to venture down there between the 12th and 17th of August, you'll find myself and Simon Perkins, clutching whisky glasses and telling far-fetched tales of steel city spirits, tap room poltergeists and murdered widows.

I arrived at the Edinburgh Fringe on Friday afternoon and was immediately chucked headlong into the festival maelstrom, with performers flyering every street corner and large swathes of the city centre turned into beer tents for the month (oh, what a drag). As a Fringe virgin, everything seems rather bewhildering at first, but I'm fast learning that it's an advantage not to have a clue what's going on around you: the scale of the festival is frankly mind-blowing otherwise.

'A Pint for the Ghost' is here as part of the PBH Free Fringe, founded by Peter Buckley Hill in 1996. The Free Fringe has a fantastically supportive atmosphere, with performers watching each others' shows, helping with set up and even partially staffing the door – I'm immensely grateful to the stars and behind-the-scenes staff of 'The Head Girl, the Gap Year and Sue Ellen' who have always been on hand to help me lug chairs and tables around and dish out flyers.

Our venue is the brilliantly spooky Banqueting Hall, downstairs in the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street, a stone's throw from The Royal Mile. Inside, the Labyrinth is a maze of eerie corridors and, as 'Scotland's most haunted pub', hosts ghost tours several times a day. For the next 4 weeks, comedians, storytellers, cabaret performers and spoken word artists are taking over the pub's many rooms to host free performances. The verdict? So far so good: we've had pretty much full houses most nights and, apart from the odd glitch with the CD player or an over-enthusiastic smoke machine (which gave particular resonance to the line in my opening poem that mentions 'pubs still cast in smoke so thick you barely see your hand before your face'), our first three shows in particular went swimmingly.

Edinburgh seems like the natural home for 'A Pint...' after all. The city's winding, cobbled streets and dark gothic buildings are crawling with ghosts. Even in the daytime, as crowds surge over North Bridge and shoppers crowd Princes Street, there are still corners where you can feel a distinct chill in the air. Nowhere more so than the Banqueting Hall in darkness. Last night, the performance was interrupted by repeated banging sounds and, as we cleared up, we were accosted by a less-than-sober contortionist, who told us that the ceiling had partly collapsed on him as he performed in the space last year...and he was definitely blaming ghouls instead of faulty architecture.

As befits the festival, I've managed to sustain a few monumental hangovers, ably assisted by the mind-altering properties of Tennent's lager. I've also taken in a range of other spoken-word shows, loosely connected by the theme of death: Literary Death Match, Tim Clare's Death Drive, Molly Naylor's 'Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You' and the fantastic Dead Poets. All highly recommended to anyone who is in town for the Fringe. There's also been plenty of whisky window shopping, running up hills and more pints of Brewdog's aptly named 'Trashy Blonde' than I care to recall. Amongst all that, I also found time to walk into a lampost in true, slapstick style, whilst reading a map. Living proof that, whatever audacious claims my show might make, I'm definitely not a ghost: ghosts don't bounce.