Sunday 29th August

I get up early and nip for a much-needed shower before the other two appear. A day of sweltering, tiny theatres has taken its toll, plus my mum is coming up from the Borders to take us for breakfast this morning, so scrubbing up is absolutely essential. Mum arrives with my step-dad in tow, in their especially lovely new Jaguar XF (which has a dial instead of a gearstick – how cool is that?) and pick my brother and I up at around 10am. We drive the short distance to a nearby cafe, where we sit and wait for it to open properly before having a pretty decent fry-up and a nice chat about wedding plans and whatnot (this being the first time we've met up since the engagement) before they head back into the wilderness.

My brother and I head home and spend the rest of the morning playing NHL 2003 until it becomes clear that, for our own sanity, we should probably leave the house. There are two shows we want to see today, the first of which starts at 2.40 at a place called The Caves on the Cowgate. We head down early to make sure we can get tickets (clearly aiming for better-known shows today to avoid being in a room with 10 old fogies again) for Nerds of a Feather, a geek-themed show featuring sets from two comedians called Graham Goring and Chris Stokes. The first talks, Stokes, about being a geek, and particularly about his love for TV shows like Doctor Who and Columbo, as well as the “I think you'll find...” geek phenomenon. He comes across as very likeable and has a lot of good jokes, making subtle use of a projector to do some nice visual gags. Graham Goring looks worryingly like me and uses the projector much more in his set, with visuals, animations and sound effects annotating almost all his jokes. It's very enjoyable from a nerdy perspective and I especially like his jokes about Super Mario Brothers and Sonic 3, something I don't think I've seen done in a comedy club before. Today is their last show of the run and they make a nice point at the end of coming on stage together to thank the venue staff and so on, as well as each other. I can't imagine how much doing something like this every day for a month must take it out of you and feel like a bit of an epic slog.

Our next show, as with yesterday, is shortly after this one and on the other side of town. We wander over there and buy our tickets to see Andy Zaltzman, whose work I know well having spent much of the last two years listening to his Bugle podcast (making it odd that I haven't got round to seeing him in London before, though he did once walk past me at Highbury & Islington tube station). He has an odd, clownish look but does a great line in political satire mixed with surreal flights of fantasy, as well as what he knowingly refers to as “incredibly contrived similes” throughout. The show runs for just over the usual hour, featuring the story of how he delivered his newborn son on the bathroom floor (with obligatory cricket metaphors used to describe his catching technique) and a discussion on the pros and cons of the coalition government. It's incredibly clever and the jokes come thick and fast, even with the drier material. My brother seems to enjoy it a lot too, which I'm pleased about. This is our last show of the Fringe (and indeed Zaltzman's) and it's definitely ending on a high.

We walk back up the hill into town, unsure as to how we fancy spending the rest of the evening. IN the end we decide that it's been an expensive weekend, so we grab the makings of home-made pizza from Sainsbury's and head back to his flat for some grub. We also, for some reason, end up watching The X-Factor (that's two Sundays in a row – what's happening to me?!) and the apparently extraneous (X-traneous?) X-tra Factor hosted by Konnie Huq. By 11.30 this rather heavy weekend has totally caught up with me, and I head for an early bed (which is probably a great relief for my has-to-go-to-his-sensible-job-tomorrow little brother, who's done a great job of entertaining me these last three nights). Back to London tomorrow, then.