Well here I am. Again. Edinburgh. The place I come every August for just shy of a whole month, but an event around which the whole year seems to revolve. I’m back in the same flat we rented last year so it feels almost like the last twelve months haven’t happened and I’m still here, a doll that fell into a nap, reanimated by the braying of approaching revellers. Like a sleepy nymph of Bacchus, waiting for a pat on the head to awaken her. I’m sat at the same kitchen table – rustic worn pine squiggled with markings that hint of late night debates and civilised smoked tea breakfasts, edges beveled by fraternal elbows. A chap called Quintus rents it out every festival – the whole flat, not just the table, though he’d probably find some student company willing to bed down for a cut-price rent while they peddle their a capella musical version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He presumably uses this month’s long cacophonous ego display as a sane man’s excuse for a holiday. You might as well make some money and dash for the highlands when the city is invaded by nutjobs. If I wasn’t one of those nutjobs, (and I owned expensive property in a nice part of one of the world’s most beautiful places) I’d definitely do the same.

I like this place. It feels like home now, but I suppose a place where you’ve had a month of condensed experiences with all the highs and lows and sideways emotional jousting of Life is always going to feel a bit familiar when you return to it with your carefully managed hopes and your battle scars.

Dear Quintus left a lovely ‘welcome back’ note that made us coo like cosy pigeons, with some bread and eggs and butter and wine and fruit and oat cakes and soft garlic cheese and most importantly the wifi code. I have done the obligatory space check. The re-acquainting perambulation of the place, the respectful hands-behind-back stalking of the book shelves, nodding sagely at his choice of art and colours, as though I’m walking around the drawing room of a stately home, reading the visual language and all that it tells us about people.

He has very good soap, our Quint. You can tell a lot about a man from his soap. And his books. I like both his choices in this matter and I’ll be sure to inform him in the form of a hurriedly written slightly mental note when I leave; a husk in four week’s time. And I don’t know if he shoved it at the back of the drawer for the rest of the year and got it out like Christmas decorations, but a flier from my play last year, Pramkicker, is on his fridge, held in place by a cute fridge magnet. I don’t know if our Quintus is a bit of a flirt, but that stuff definitely works on me. We’ve got a future, me & he. Even if that future is never actually meeting but me nodding approvingly as I finger his white sheets the same time next year when he goes on a yoga retreat to Bali with money I should have spent better.

Now that the August home has been settled into, my clothes flung around his room most never to be worn, all that remains is the rest of the city. The world outside. The show and the people and the inevitable madness. The toil of fun, the searing self-doubt, the mini unpredictable surprise glories should there be any due, and the knowledge that no matter how tired and emotional I get, however battered by whatever is coming for me, I am a very lucky girl.

Sadie’s new play Fran & Leni is published on Tuesday by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

It is playing at Assembly for the entire run of the Edinburgh Festival 2016.

Summer is a happy time. A time of expecting sunshine and then complaining about it when it comes. A time of pasty legs with a crabstick blush and angry gnatbites turning smooth skin into the surface of Mars. A time of walking out without a jacket not knowing and not caring what time you’ll get home, of warm drizzle and of fields and hot tarmac and powdered sweaty smells and cars blaring loud music like unwanted gifts that still pierce your grump even if you hate the song. (It’s usually Will Smith – have you noticed?)

We are warmed by the sun, by all the underlying serendipitous science that accompanies that ball of flame in the sky that makes us feel kissed and blessed and open. Our bodies get a bit feisty for it all in the heat don’t they. I mean, not when it’s too hot. Then you’re like “DON’T TOUCH ME. I WILL LITERALLY DIE.” But our skin feels different. For a while we are programmed slightly different. Warm as bread, loving as puppies, carefree as children, dirty as cavemen.

Summer is a time for love. Falling in love and for celebrating love. Summer is awash with weddings. Some people get completely enchanted by them. They mark their calendars with these little bursts of ceremonial joy in brighter ink and pin them to the wall or fridge. Weddings for me on the other hand usually come screaming at me the day before when I realise that all of my bras have broken as I drag a crinkled playsuit out of the back of the wardrobe and forget that in wearing it I will be signing myself up to about thirty urinations with my entire outfit around my ankles.

I’ve had a double-whammy of weddings in the last couple of weeks. One was a secret wedding so I cannot divulge details other than IT WAS AMAZING. And the other was one of my best mate’s, who totally nailed it. A beautiful wedding that didn’t make me feel awkward or bored, not even for five minutes. I usually find myself sloping off to have a private sit-down – just for a break from all the unfettered lavishness or sentiment or pomp or over-expense or stultifying awkwardness of people being polite in too-stiff clothes – usually with my entire outfit around my ankles. Bathrooms are a wonderful chance for clarity. No one can drag you out to be sociable if they think you’re weeing.

But despite not being bored, and despite feeling unpunctuated merriment, I found myself still seeking those five minutes of stillness. Late in the evening as the crowd thinned to leave the hardcore of dancers, I was struck quiet. I suddenly needed a spot away from the fun I was having – and I was having fun – to figure out why I had gone all pensive. Clanged like a bell. I feel a lot of things at weddings in between various instances of high heeled discomfort. Surreal hilarity that I was ever briefly married against my way-too-late better judgement. Sadness that if I ever meet anyone I want to marry my dad will never have met him, sadness that my dad never got to give me away or do a speech during which only then would I notice his hair is now completely silver. Confusion over whether I believe marriage is necessary, inspiring, or advisable at all in the modern world. Mini feminist diatribes in my own head about how women are presented and given away and pressured to feel; indignance at the ceremonial echoes of our being passed from man to man like cattle that we choose to keep alive in pretty tradition. I think and feel many things but I have never felt like I want it for myself. So why had I gone quiet in the middle of some very good Britpop?

I sat down on a wall outside. Out of nowhere and with that dawning rush that may or may not have been stoked by a day of slow booze, I think I felt genuinely open to it. To marriage. That’s why I didn’t recognise it and I had to sit on my own for a bit. It’s a strange thing to suddenly feel out of the blue when you are single. Maybe it’s a good time to feel it. Maybe it makes you evaluate things better than when you’re feeling it in the throes of a relationship. I don’t know.

It was quite a big five minutes. To feel that. To explore that possibility. Sometimes you need those five minutes of quiet in the bustle of a wedding, while the dancefloor buzzes with life inside as you sit on a wall in the cooling night, and think about what you want. What do you want? What do I want? Do you want the marriage and the babies and the shared shelves. Do I? Do I actually? Do I dare disturb my universe? The summer can trick you that you want it all. It makes strange energy dance under your warm skin like fireflies in a paper bag. I went back inside and I danced but a part inside stayed quiet.

Things you do at a festival that you don’t usually do:

1. Waltz with a young man named Cecil in a forest after spending twenty minutes asking him how he spelled his name, convinced he’d got it wrong.
2. Buy the contents of an entire big sized Tescos out of fear that as soon as you enter the festival site you will be locked in to experience some sort of apocalyptic showdown til the death, like a literal take on the Hunger Games with everyone fighting it out with hand-made bows and arrows for the last mini babybel. Could happen. This world is getting crazier by the day. Also, by giving in to ‘The Fear’ it gives you a really good excuse to lick the jam out of a doughnut for breakfast. It would be wasteful not to. And, you know. Africa.
3. Walk around holding hands with your mate, who is dressed as a unicorn.
4. TENTS! (HOW DO THEY WORK?)
5. Go to bed with your sunblushed skin glowing like embers, to lie with your head out of your miraculously erected tent letting the rain fall lightly on your face until you feel yourself drifting to sleep and drag yourself slowly in under cover like an earthworm.
6. Wear flowers in your hair because you feel like you are now Official Ambassador for Natural Living and need to take news of the Pagan Way back to The Real World.
7. Hug people just for telling you where you can buy falafel. There’s not enough hugging of strangers in my book, at any time of the year, not just festival season. I think the world needs more spontaneously administered hugs at the moment. I’d like to see drop-in centres popping up around the country, so if you’re passing one and you’re feeling like you need a burst of random and anonymous human kindness, you can nip in and get one as easy as buying gum.
8. Dance as the sun’s going down. Things are generally better as the sun’s going down. Maybe because you’re caught in that half-light, as day fades and night arrives and you sub-consciously make peace with the loss of another day and the sky offers you strange colours by way of apology. We don’t do enough things by sunset. Most days we don’t stop to clock it happening, we just rush around going about our business, but when we do, it’s like something stills in our heart for a moment, no matter how briefly.
9. Hold your lavatorials for as long as humanly possible in the name of all that is holy. Literally. You do it for your holes. You don’t want a badger to crawl up there. You’re in the country. Anything could happen. So you hold it. There are also other reasons why you don’t go the toilets at festivals as often as you might at home. But we don’t need to go there. We all know what lurks beneath the depths of that inky blue flush-water. And it’s not a whimsical Charles Kingsley otherworld of Water Babies, it’s a nightmarish Bosch painting of bottomly hell.
10. Perform a brand new play for the first time ever in what is essentially a public dress rehearsal to a big theatre tent packed full of people including reviewers. In fishnets. Insane. Get another career. You are mental.
11. Lick the rest of the jam out of the now stale doughnuts.
12. Grapple your good friend, the tent, to the ground, in one of a million efforts to get the tinker back in its bag. Blame the state of education today for why you haven’t got the necessary skills to solve logical problems. Blame Gove. Blame them all. Somehow get the tent in the bag. Crack open a beer. One less thing to carry home in your five thousand Tesco bags.
13. 

Theatres are funny places. They seem to absorb a little bit of everyone that spends time in them. No matter how many times I’m in a theatre, or how welcome they make me feel, I always feel a little like I don’t belong. Like there is a long list of people far more deserving who have been there, who have done it far better. I think it might be because I don’t actually consider myself all that theatrical. Lots of people really nail the theatrics. My dressing room mates this week for example. I’ve just done a week’s run of my play Pramkicker in London. It was fun but shattering and to be honest I feel like I could sleep for a week.

The show after ours was a piece of glossy fun called Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens. A musical. Every day, after we had finished the play and were collecting our stuff together to head out to the bar, they would knock at the door and ask if we were decent. Not that it would have mattered if we weren’t. They were all I’m sure at least 2000% interested in the opposite sex. We could have had our naked breasts out on platters and our derrières covered in melted chocolate and they wouldn’t have even glanced in our direction.

Once we’d said a cheery “come in”, in they would clatter with their bright bags full of even brighter costumes, make-up at least half-done and sequins and gemstones stuck around their faces. They were instantly at least ten times more interesting than us. They were like exotic birds swooping in to land in the trees, feathers outstretched, squawking shrilly. And they had jokes. Everything they said came with a pithy actor’s phrase or a double-entendre or a camp retort. A couple of them had that matryred suffering air of the actor in transit; as though their Art was a burden to which they were shackled til death. Art, dahling. Exquisite suffering. Their voices sang with expression, their bodies were beautiful and packaged in Fun. They were theatrical. They were Theatre. The most theatrical thing I’d done, other than rock up to do the play in the first place of course, was neck a Red Bull before the show, burp out loud, and do two nervous wees while deep-breathing. Most of the time I didn’t even bother with lipstick. They out-theatred me just by existing.

I felt like a dull little sparrow compared to their rainbow cockatoos. But I’d watch them taking it all in, absorbing their funny ways and smiling. Then when I’d finished packing up my rather ordinary costume I would leave the dressing room, with a cheery wave and the traditional “Break a leg!” To which they would sing queeny farewells that were worthy of a own show all of their own. I passed back through the theatre and over the empty stage, lights unlit, absolutely convinced that they would spank the show out of the ceiling and through the skies of London. They would give it all they had, and then some. With sequins on.

As I trudged out into the bar, weary and in desperate need of a long cool drink, I would find my friends, chat to the audience members who had stayed to say well done, and find a corner to stow my stuff in til hometime, my bags of play-making oddments done for the day. Despite having only just been offstage for fifteen minutes, despite having cried and shouted and danced and joked about in front of an audience, I fell quiet. I reset myself to neutral, untheatrical, feeling like a cuckoo in the cockatoo’s nest, quiet and unconfident until the next show. Theatre is a strange friend, never fully to be trusted.

  

Imagine if you woke up one morning with the ability to wipe the slate clean. To start again. Would you do it? Are there things you would alter, or eradicate completely? Or would you only tidy up a few things rather than blot the lot?

I suspect there are very few people who wouldn’t change a thing. There are very few of us who manage to convincingly say they wouldn’t change the bad things because they know they make them stronger. We still, out of loyalty to a sense of purity, look back to the life before trouble and think “Yes. Even though I’ve learned lots and am stronger and everything, I kind of liked it when I was simpler.”

We’re all a bit grubby really aren’t we. No matter how we scrub ourselves up or how we make nice or put the front up, we all show the signs of wear and tear from birth. But would we wipe it all clean if we could?

People talk to me a lot about a lot of stuff. I think writing this column for four years makes them think they know me a bit, and I think something in my flinging out little stories from my life makes them feel safe doing the same. I like that they do. I like to talk to people. For at least a day a week it makes me think if I was a better person I would give up all my nonsense and train as a counsellor. Do some good. Maybe one day.

It occurs to me that almost without exception they are people who want to change something. Who feel one way and wish to feel another, who are in a situation they wish was somehow different. Standing on one side of something and wishing to leap over and be on the other side. To see if that something different makes them happier.

I have female friends asking me to set them up with a man, to find them ‘the right person’, when I am not qualified to know what that is. It’s as though being a writer makes them think you have answers, when really you have none. And these friends – funny intelligent beautiful women who have found themselves single again and want to start again – are asking me to fix them up from the magical black book of my life. I’ve not been terribly useful. One girlfriend ranted at me “WHAT IS WITH EVERYONE BEING WITH SOMEONE. ARE THEY JUST SETTLING? HOW HAVE THEY GOT IT RIGHT? WHERE ARE ALL THE SINGLE ELIGIBLE MEN?” and I sipped my gin wide-eyed and thought about it for the first time. Where ARE all the single eligible men? I couldn’t think of any single mates I could set her up with. I couldn’t think of a single person that I would set her up with in real life. In lieu of something useful to say I just topped up our glasses.

And I felt that small rush of panic. That “am I getting this life stuff right?” That little hot flush in the blood of wondering if I’m doing any of the right things. That’s the trouble with talking to people. It makes you think. Bastards.

What if I starting saying yes to the people who ask me on dates? Would that be a good new thing?

What would happen if I said yes to the people who have said “let’s just go. Sod it, let’s just…go.” What if I went? What if I packed my bags for a few months and went off on an adventure? Would that be a good thing? Would that, by getting distance to everything, be a bit like wiping the slate clean? How might my life change?

If you woke up one morning with the ability to start again, would you?

I almost puked when I saw it. My massive face. It’s probably not healthy to have quite such a visceral reaction to the sight of your own visage, but there we go. It was like the moon. Somebody, right here at the paper, the tykes, had put a really big picture of my face alongside a piece about my play, and I almost puked when I got handed a copy. I was mortified that people would open up the pages and see it. I wanted to issue an apology for my face and for having a piece about my stupid play. I wanted to stop doing plays, because plays are stupid. Because anything humans do that isn’t sitting in a cave hiding from mammoths and waiting for the next meal is stupid. All this stuff we do, what is it? Stupid.

And of course all of this is perfectly ridiculous. Get over it Hasler. No one cares. Quite right. And after I’d stopped mentally giving myself the birch like a mediaeval monk, I did get over it. Because even punishing myself was making me want to vomit too.

I suppose it’s only natural to have feelings of gross self-effacement. I know in this age of self-based psycho-analytic enlightenment we’re supposed to accept ourselves and like ourselves and all that, but we don’t really trust people who actually do, do we? There’s something shifty about people who like themselves. We want to know how they do it, but we don’t want to ask. Because asking is a step closer to trying and if we fail then that’s one more thing to dislike isn’t it?

The piece in the paper was about my play. Tomorrow is the day it is being published and the first day of the tour. A big day for me. I should be happy to shout it from the rooftops, happy to be in the paper, happy that someone wrote a nice thing about me. But I just feel like a twit.

Maybe it’s an English thing. Maybe we’re culturally predisposed to see our face in a newspaper and want to screw it up. Or maybe it’s just a human thing. Maybe we’re genetically predisposed to seeing our face in a newspaper and want to screw it up.

But I think we owe it to ourselves to try and hurdle over our innate dissatisfaction with ourselves. Because otherwise it’s a long old slog to the end of life if we’re not happy in our own skin, in our own company, in our own heads. We sort of have to be a better friend to ourselves to make the journey nice. Be kind and accepting. See the good parts of ourselves like we see the good parts of other people. Allow ourselves to celebrate our achievements.

In addition to liking ourselves we occasionally have to push ourselves too, because we seldom have benefactors to do it for us. We have to take up the things we are passionate about and wave them like flags, because if we don’t we allow them to stay hidden. And that is sad. Because the world is nicer when we all share our passions outwardly. That’s what gives life colour.
  

I had a terribly cultured weekend. This was not due to me being terribly cultured in general – that is a label saved for people better than I – but simply because I got off my typing-til-I-twitch toosh and said yes to stuff. I am not a great goer to things. I either find myself “too busy” or too forgetful, only remembering an event is on afterwards when I hear people talking about how great it was. 

But this weekend there was a constellation of stuff I wanted to make the effort for, and the condensed calendar splurge gave me an almost commando roll burst of energy. I was all “You can do this, Hasler.” I was like an action hero of Saying Yes, a streak-faced marine of administrative planning – mapping out where I had to be and when, so I could make it all happen. For once, useless forgetful twit Hasler was going to Go To The Things.

And I did. I made it to most of the things. And I didn’t fall over and I didn’t spill anything and I didn’t accidentally call someone’s new wife by the old wife’s name, like the last time I decided to be a social butterfly. I would have been way less dangerous in the times when divorce was heavily discouraged, let me tell you. I can do one wife’s name. But two is asking a lot of me. Put the effort in, guys. Marriage is supposed to be for life, not just for a cocktail party.

I made it to the newspaper launch and the rock gig. I made it to the exhibition launch and the pub and the other exhibition launch. I made it to the theatre. I only missed one event, which was a party, and that was only because I was being polite and didn’t want to rock up at 1am with a bag of Doritos while they were stacking the dishwasher in their dressing gowns. So I don’t count it as a fail. I count that as a win for not being the kind of idiot who turns up with snacks when the hosts are listening to Radio 4 and talking about how great all their punctual friends are.

While all the events were great in their own way, one really stole my heart for the weekend. The first event I made it to. On Friday I went to see an ex pupil and now colleague of mine, Paige, read a piece she’d written about Wild Swimming at the Trawler magazine launch. She had been very nervous, but had no need to be. She was brilliant – calm and engaging and delightful. The kind of person who not only commands admiration, but who inspires love. Even if you’ve only known her for five minutes. Paige spoke about finding herself in a landlocked Midlands town for University, then of returning home to the sea. I sympathised. Coming back from Uni was the thing that made me fall in love with my town again, a love that is still strong enough to keep me here, even when London beckons. Perhaps it was due to the wine, but I felt a little teary rush go through me watching her speak. For her nerves and her victory, for her thoughts and her experience, for the age she was, the age she is, the ages she will be, for all that awaits her. I remembered her little face from school as I watched the beauty she has grown into. Boom. There it was. The memory, again. Those girls I taught kept me sane when Dad went. Here one of them is, years later. In my life again. And here I will be for her, if she needs. Even if it’s just to ply her with just the sensible amount of confidence-bestowing booze before she gets on stage to do stuff. Doing stuff is good.
  

Got to go to a funeral in a bit. Always a strange feeling when you wake up knowing that you are going to say goodbye to someone that day, isn’t it. 

I met my friend Katie for lunch the other day. Her wonderful mum had just passed away and I needed to hold her and know she was doing ok. She seemed absolutely fine. I had almost forgotten how brilliant people are at holding it together when their insides are in tumult. The nearest she came to going was when we took her daughter to the bathroom, and stood hugging and listening to a funeral song while little Connie went for a wee. 

Katie and I were kids together, at school and youth theatre, running around playing games and being in plays about evacuees and Narnia, and now life wasn’t a play anymore, it was real. We had lost people, we had had kids and careers and bad things happen. Katie was there for me when my Dad died. Years later I introduced her to my lovely friend Mike and they got together. They named their first baby girl after me. Sadie. The only other Sadie I’ve known. Is there any sweeter reminder that you have been sweetly usurped by the young; to have your name taken and passed on to a little person, unformed by life.

The day we met for lunch I had had little sleep. I had got in the night before exhausted from a fierce day of rehearsals and admin, and collapsed on the bed. But I could not sleep. My friend Susie had gone into labour hours earlier, had spent a frustrating day after her waters had broken just waiting for something to happen. The whole day while rehearsing I was thinking of her, and I knew that as I went to sleep, she was likely to be trekking through the unknown lands of labour. I drifted off eventually, feeling guilty that I would be sleeping while she gave birth, but excited that I would wake up and her baby girl would be here. Always strange when you go to sleep knowing you’ll wake up to someone new existing in your life, isn’t it. Baby Ella.

A couple of weeks ago another friend of mine Sarah sat at the table, beaming. I had just given her my Heather Shimmer lipstick, a find in an old make-up bag. It still smelled exactly as I remembered it, and taking off the lid was like I had unstoppered the essence of the 90s. It was classrooms and the back of the bus and kissing boys. Sarah had a different memory of it. Her mum wore it for years, and it was on her mummy’s lips when she kissed her goodbye for the last time in 2001. As we sat drinking and talking, at a meal for my mum’s 60th, I gave Sarah the lipstick so she could see it, put some on. Feel close to her mum. But it was the smell that really took her back. Smell is funny like that isn’t it. I made her keep it. I wanted her to always be able to smell it if she needed to.

I resisted crying for Sarah’s grief, though it reminded me of my own. I managed to just about keep it in when Katie told me her mum had died, though I remembered what that chasm feels like. I didn’t cry when I woke to find that Susie had had a tricky night birthing baby Ella. I didn’t even cry when I held Katie in the pub bathroom while we listened to Chris de Bergh as her daughter chattered on the toilet. But I cried when I got in. Big pelting tears for all of them. For all of us, for everyone. For my mum who never really knew her mum. For a dear friend who lost his mum years ago and misses her terribly and is now scared and helpless watching his Dad growing weaker. My chest felt like it was cracking open for everything all at once. And then I stopped. My face dried. I got on with my day. Sometimes you have to let it out, all the life and love and death, don’t you. 
We cannot really regret tears cried for other people’s pain. Other people are the best things about us.