Sunstroke at the Fringe

I was 10 or 11 my first time visiting Scotland. My dad, in his infinite wisdom, wanted to visit all the 32 counties in Ireland, and loved a nice roadtrip. We’d already drove from Ballina to Buncrana for a night earlier in the summer, an 8 hour roundtrip, the home of the first house he built (A bungalow built about £4000 if I remember correctly, number 121 in Bungalow Bliss TM). Having caravaned around most of the countries in the Republic, catching a ferry from Larne to Stranraer gave us a good reason to visit Northern Ireland from Mayo. Dad had already been in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry during the Troubles (I found a letter he wrote, saying that he go stopped driving by masked men one night driving through Tyrone from Longford to Donegal, and thought he was going to die..until he heard the British accents and realised they were undercover soldiers, not the UDA/IRA). Less likely to shoot innocent civilians. So we passed through Enniskillen, Omagh around Lough Neagh to Belfast, and up to Larne. Once we got on the ferry, it was a long drive to Edinburgh. One of my cousins had a flat there for college, and kindly let us stay, as she’d a yearlong lease and no reason to use it in mid-August. It was a nice flat all considered, near the center of Edinburgh, three bedrooms (One a closet with no windows), an open plan kitchen/sitting room. Not bad. No way you could get one like that nowadays on a student budget. Bored one day, I looked at some of the magazines lying around - apparently it rains 265 days a year in Scotland, and its constantly dreary druich weather. Nice.

We spent the days walking around Edinburgh. It was scorching hot, for Scotland, at least 18 degrees, and we walked the Royal Mile several times. I distinctly remember drinking coke looking at the buses, the brown stone buildings, like nothing I’d seen in Ireland . We took in the advertisers with their fringe flyers, and went to one. As a 10 year old,second row, sitting beside my sister, the comedian caught me early under the spotlight.. It wasn’t late, so underage wasn’t a problem, but still, certain gags were coming, and he asked Claire to cover my ears. The crowd loved it. They were fairly dirty from what I remember. Jokes on him though, they would have went over my head without her hands on the sides.

I’d got a bit of a headache during the gig, and it got fairly bad on the way to the flat. We got in the door and Dad put me to bed in the boxroom. “Too much walking for one day”. Headache didn’t go away, it got worse and no air in the box room made me very queasy. Not much to do from there, but make a run for the toilet. I remember distinctly vomiting into the cistern, and as an 11 year old, the first time you remember throwing up sticks with you. Dad panicked a little. Why would I be getting sick? Dodgy food? Carbon monoxide in the room? Noone else was ill. I think he called one of my aunts, a nurse. Then came to the conclusion. All I’d drank all day was a can of coke. With all the walking, under the 20 degree sun, we never stopped to drink water. Him and Claire got a drink at the show. He felt pretty bad. But still, better than our first holiday abroad after Mam died, where I got second degree burns at a waterpark in Lanzoate, after forgetting to put on sunscreen. That was a long flight home with blisters on my shoulders. And yet I always associate sunstroke with Scotland.