Poetry Excerpt I Am Not Here

Last stand: The Forest Fringe's fight for survival

CALLING on all "hippies, lunatics, and junkies" to rally to the cause, one of the Fringe's top performers joins the campaign to save one of its most eclectic venues, when, at half past midnight, for about three hours, Daniel Kitson, winner of both top comedy and theatre accolades in the festival, will perform his trilogy Stories for a Starlit Sky at the Forest Fringe, from its base in the Forest Cafe.

The stories were first performed in Regent's Park open air theatre in London at midnight on three separate nights. Kitson will perform all three, back to back, for the first time ever, for GBP20 on the door, as part of the campaign to save the Forest Cafe, and the mini-festival it has housed for four years.

Kitson doesn't usually give interviews. But in an e-mail message circulating online he wrote: "The Forest Fringe is a great thing, in a great place. It's run on barely any money at all, and has a fascinating programme, every year...

"The building that houses the Forest Fringe is being sold, which would force the Forest Cafe and by extension the Forest Fringe into something approaching oblivion." When a prospective buyer for the building dropped out after being refused planning permission, Kitson said: "There is a genuine window of opportunity for a lovely thing to happen. For shambolic good to prevail. For a great space to be preserved. Albeit by hippies, lunatics and junkies."

For eight years, the Forest Cafe has been a counter-cultural gathering spot in Edinburgh's city centre. Its entrance is opposite the high end Hotel Du Vin, among the porcelain and art shops, and crowded tourist diners, just round the corner from the refurbished National Museum of Scotland. It is known for its vegan burritos, and the bafflingly gender-blind basement toilets covered with murals.

Its ramshackle but bustling cafe, with an overwhelmingly youthful, laid-back clientele, has large, labelled containers of muesli, marsalla sauce, or cumin seeds. On the wall is the Forest's formula for the "mysterious element" of success: a combination of S for space, P for people, R for resource, T for time, and U for the Uncontrollable factor. It operates on a handful of part-time staff and a network of a couple of hundred volunteers.

'SECOND CIRCLE' EXCERPT « INSIDE THE MARGINS

The morning Camille Foster left Washington D.C. for good could not have been more frightfully dismal. The cold, driving rain that had fallen the night before had suddenly deteriorated into a freezing, persistent drizzle that was beginning to feel a lot like snow. The arctic air was thick with the vapor of a dark, low-hanging fog, which crept steadily off the banks of the Potomac until it finally held enough sway to blanket the entire city; shrouding it, and seemingly the rest of the world, in a dour, almost surreal lifelessness.

Ironically, Camille never felt more at home here.

The streets were wet and slick, like smooth asphalt mirrors, as her taxi made its way to ReaganNationalAirport. Traffic was non-existent, which was never the case in D.C., not even at 5:30in the morning. There seemed to be no signs of life or movement anywhere. Not a creature was stirring. It was as if the citizens of this fine city had made the collective decision to stay inside, to ensure that nothing or no one would impede Camille’s speedy, final exit out of town. A coward quietly running away in the night. Let her go in peace.