Dying at the Fringe

I love my Edinburgh flat mates, they're very good people. Last year I filled our house with swine flu and was so weak I had to crawl from the shower to my bed, in a slipping towel toga, croaking "Please close your eyes or our relationship will be forever awkward." Actually, maybe that was the enticement that brought them back. Grotty little perverts.

I always get horribly ill at the Fringe. Week 3 is like a mirage in the desert; I'll never reach it (book tickets now!). I have ended up in hospital twice with trembling, feverish kidneys and one year I went blind. I was discovered apologising to a bin by my kind friend who took me to the Eye Hospital. I really hope I don't get ill this year but there are definite upsides; I'm grateful for every healthy day, the impending axe of illness adds a frisson of tension to proceedings, and I really like the medical staff in Edinburgh, they're always so nice to me, I can't help looking forward to my next visit. My show is all about being excitedly poised for disaster, so I like to think of my pathetic immune system like a ticking time bomb I carry inside me.

Today in my Edinburgh house we have found a way to instil confidence in ourselves by using our names as verbs. As in "We'll Ginger and Black it up a little" – that sounds zingy yet racist. To "Luurtsema it" sounds like a medical procedure, a small, fiddly, disgusting one, like freezing a wart. If Luurtsema was a verb it should mean to get drunk on two glasses of wine at 4pm, be sent home, and exit the taxi bottom-first on hands and knees like a toddler, explaining to the driver “I'm not drunk I just have a very low centre of gravity.”