I'd reached a pretty low ebb today.  A series of unsatisfactory auditions, where either I wasn't pleased with my own work, or everything had seemed ok, but then I'd heard nothing.  Add to that, a stack of applications that had gone nowhere, and a growing suspicion that maybe I was just being grossly arrogant in thinking I had any future in this line of work.  Even auditions that had gone well were now subject to fine scrutiny as to what I'd done wrong, what I should have done better, etc., etc...

And then an email arrives.  From an audition a couple of weeks ago, which I thought had gone well, but which I'd pretty much given up on by now.  I'm going to the Edinburgh Fringe. 

Just like that, the world changes, self-belief returns, and I can accept the possibility that maybe I can do this after all.

Extraordinary thing, the mind.  I never cease to be amazed at my own capacity for irrational emotional reactions.

A small thing occurred today.  A very small thing, which in and of itself, means nothing whatever.  It bears a passing (though very tenuous) similarity to a much larger, more significant, more painful thing that happened many years ago.  Now, I know perfectly well that it isn't the same at all, and yet there's a massive emotional reaction.  I watched it start, knowing it was starting, knowing it wasn't in any way an appropriate response, but quite unable to prevent it happening.

Now, some considerable time later, my rational mind is still watching this all going on, still fully aware that it's a completely phantom emotion, inappropriate, out of all proportion, and unrelated to real events... but equally without a clue how to switch off this constant layer of unruly angst that permeates everything.  The only thing guaranteed to kill it, is an external event, out of my control - which is a problem in itself, because the absence of that event, the waiting for it, becomes bound up in the existing emotional gordian knot.  I have, somehow, to force myself not to want that event, not to attribute huge significance to it, not to think, "everything will be fine when that happens"; because to do so would be to reinforce, amplify, legitimize the problem.

None of this is especially ground-breaking of course - I've no doubt it's very familiar to pretty much anyone who's likely to read this:  Everybody has their own little pot of neuroses, and their own ways of working round them.  It does fascinate me though, that two such conflicting ideas can co-exist in this way:  That I can be rational enough to sit here at the keyboard and make a stab at describing what the irrational, emotional part of my head is up to, yet not sufficiently in control to stop it.  Fascinating.

Tourists in Edinburgh have the worst peripheral vision I've ever encountered.  Even worse than tourists in London; even worse than people in Tesco on pension day.

Edinburgh people themselves, of course, are lovely.  Even the staff in the Travelodge I stayed in, were excellent.  Surprisingly so - I've stayed in a lot of Travelodges, and this one, though a bit abraded in places, has some of the best staff I've seen in one.  The breakfast was jolly nice too, which is certainly not always the case!

On the Royal Mile:  Gorgeous, gentle-faced, smiling young man playing the ropiest-sounding guitar I've ever heard... but the way he was playing it was so full of joy that I almost wanted to dance down the street.

Further along the Royal Mile:  Coming towards me were two students, one Cheguevara t-shirt, the other the ubiquitous tweed jacket, skinny jeans and slightly-too-small trilby.  Under their arms, each carried a good-sized red flag.  Freshly made, by the look of them.  As they passed me, a snippet of conversation, in the plummiest Etonian, "...well yes, because you see, that's the trouble with the white working class..."