Jen Brister is enjoying her sixth year performing as a stand-up at the Edinburgh Frince - well, perhaps 'enjoying' isn't quite the right word.

With the Fringe well and truly underway there has been a tangible sigh of relief in my Edinburgh flat share. Unfortunately this has been canceled out by an audible intake of panic. Still, that 0.2 of a second’s respite was extremely welcome.

Cosseted as we are in the Meadows, the three of us are lucky enough not to be living in the hub of Festival madness.

I’m sat in a café pretending that I don’t have a show tonight. Right now I’m fantasising that I’m a very important writer, writing something very important, about important things that important people, like yourselves, might actually read.

As opposed to the reality, which is that I’m writing a self-indulgent blog about what a neurotic t**t I am. 

I like this fantasy and from a distance I think I look the part. I’m sat in this trendy café tapping away on my laptop, drinking a black coffee and sporting a beret. Ok I’m not wearing a beret but I did draw on a pencil mustache, which I think is giving me an air of mystery I otherwise don’t possess.

This fantasy can’t last and at some point I’m going to bump into a comedian (after all there are 300 million of them in Edinburgh right now) and the ritual of annoying Q&As will begin, “How are you? How’s your show going? What are your audience numbers like?”

Which literally translated means: “You look awful” “Are you having a terrible time?” “Please tell me you’re getting 3 people a night, it’ll make me feel better.”

I stand there with a fixed grin on my face, whatever the question and whoever is asking it I have the same response, “The show is AMAZING!” “ I’m having THE TIME OF MY LIFE” “My audiences LOVE ME!”

They lock eyes with me with their thousand yard stare willing me to break, but I don’t! I’m a seasoned Edinburgh performer and my fixed grin lasts as long as it takes for them to turn their back before I collapse back into a ball of self-doubt & anxiety.  Ah, good times!

Don’t get me wrong, having all my peers in the same city for an entire month isn’t a bad thing. The flip side is I get to hang out with my favourite comedy pals that ordinarily I don’t see for months at a time.

We convene at late night bars and coffee shops to decompress, debrief, de-stress, decompose…ok, maybe not decompose...

My point is no one understands the pressure of performing an hour of stand up like a fellow comedian and these hook ups are essential.

With your real friends you can be honest and share stories of hour-long deaths and bad reviews, rejections from agents and passive aggressive conversations with ‘that comedian’ that NOBODY LIKES but is always doing better than you. Edinburgh is highly competitive but there is a fraternity that exists amongst us and we can choose to embrace it or exploit it. 

Personally I like to think of myself as a maverick (no one else does) and as such I fly in the face of bad reviews and character assassinations – I am bigger than that and so is my show.

My successes are personal and can’t be measured by reviews and TV execs. Whatever happens at this Festival I’m still a WINNER! Right? Right…?

Still, if you do see me wondering the streets of Edinburgh drinking a bottle of Bells out of a paper bag, feel free to give me a cuddle.

www.jenbrister.co.uk