Written by: Jim Campbell
Published: Thursday 7th August 2014

This year is my sixth consecutive year at the Edinburgh Festival. In this time I've stayed in flats of varying degrees of quality, yet they've all had one thing in common: by the end of the Festival they are a shadow of their former selves.

They take some serious punishment as they fill up with more people than they were built to house and those people gradually lose their minds. I actually feel sorry for these buildings. This is how their Festivals unfold...

Week one:

I'm confused and alone. My family have abandoned me. They did this for a whole month last year. Around this time of year actually... Oh God. Oh God no. Not again...

I have filled up with bright-eyed comedians who are excited about their shows. There are more people than beds. Things that are not beds have become beds. There's a comedian who keeps talking about how he's "smashing" everything and "tearing the roof off" of rooms. I think he's new. I'm worried that if this is true, a contents insurance claim will have to be made on my behalf and that my structural integrity will be compromised. Thankfully none of the others think this is true.

Week two:

I am a state. I'm covered in flyers and empty takeaway boxes. I'm like the world's only furnished bin. Their constant conversations about themselves are starting to do my ceiling in. The new one keeps saying his style is "Original. Like Stewart Lee."

Next door is hosting a student theatre group. I can hear them through my walls. They're so enthusiastic. Yesterday they woke me up when one of them had a revelation about how, if she lay on the floor and pretended to be dead, it would be an a-may-zing way to flyer their musical adaptation of Platoon on the Royal Mile. Later she seemed disappointed that three other theatre groups had beaten her to it, though not disappointed enough that it stopped her singing for five minutes.

Week three:

They had a party. My carpet is sodden with red wine and there is comedian sick everywhere, including in my ornamental fireplace, which I don't think any of them have discovered. I love my ornamental fireplace.

One of the comics freaked out about how nobody was coming to his show in the bathroom. That is that he freaked out in the bathroom, not that his show is in the bathroom, though the new comedian did do some of his jokes in there to try to impress one of the student theatre group from next door. It was the one time she didn't seem happy. I've heard the other guy rehearsing his show every day and if it wasn't happening inside me I wouldn't go either.

I keep making the shower go cold for no reason but it won't make them leave. It is clogged with daft hair.

Week four:

They have returned to their primal selves and I am now basically a glorified cave. The smell of broken dreams is embedded in my walls. It smells exactly like sweat and bin smell, because they've only emptied the bin twice in a month. Next door feels exactly the same. The student theatre group are still full of enthusiasm. At least my lot have finally had the decency to crack and hate their shows and each other.

They leave. I am silent and alone again. Why have my family done this to me? When they get home I'm going to break the shower, the washing machine and the cooker at the same time, then try to forget about this until next year.

Jim Campbell's Personal Space is on at 2:50pm at the Udderbelly, Bristo Square until 25th August (not 12). Listing