I have been at the Edinburgh Festival for nearly a week now, feeding my beast with lots of great theatre and Book Festival events. I’m staying with OldMan and LittleSon in two studenty bedsit rooms off Leith Walk. Each day, LittleSon and I set off, tickets in hand, to go and see stuff. The best thing we have seen so far (family shows apart) is Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage – a raunchy rock-cabaret rendition of the Seamus Heaney version – with a lovely bit of Anglo Saxon at the end. Chris Goode’s piece, The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley was great too, although in a quieter, far more intimate way, so it lost a couple of wow marks from the 11 year old.

I mention family shows because not only has OldMan, as usual, got a gig here (I, Malvolio at the Traverse, too sold out even for us to get a ticket), but Daughter has TWO things going on – she has produced Revunions: National Friends, the Bristol University Review show (we saw out of duty, but were completely won over by the surreal humour and slick performances) and her beautiful, moving production of David Greig’s Yellow Moon has been winning great reviews and selling out over at C Soco venue. She’s staying in the Revunions flat over the other side of town, but manages to meet up with us almost daily, usually at mealtimes…

It’s all great fun, and really exhausting. But what I have realised over this week is that I have fully become a writer. I have not written a word (apart from this) for nearly a week, and I have withdrawal symptoms. Itchy, scratchy, irritable and short tempered, I’m LONGING for a day with nothing happening so that I can sit in my shed at the bottom of the garden and start on my new novel, which is bashing at the edges of my brain like a baby headbutting a cervix.

But for today, it’s New Art Club and The Games by Spike Theatre (pictured above). Both promise to be funny and physical and fast. Perfect for the 11 year old. And his feeling-her-age mother.