“Ok, so I’m going to Ted Bundy but Jess and Cosmo are going to Harold Shipman and then we’re all meeting up to see Myra Hindley”

Mia looks at me over the top of octagonal sunglasses and takes a pull of a bottle of something blue.

“After that we’ve half an hour before Lucy Letby, so we could maybe meet you at the KartoffelYurt?”

For the duration of this article all comedians’ names have been replaced with those of serial killers to protect their anonymity. Protecting anonymity is the meanest thing you can do to egotistical comedians, the serial killer thing’s just a flourish.

“Hey hey hey!”

A trio in their late teens dressed as babies are giving out flyers.

“Hey hey hey! Wanna Bop with the Baby Boomers?”

Two teens are clearly into their flyering. The third looks embarrassed.

Any acts mentioned in this article are probably made up. I say probably, the Fringe is very much like the internet – if you can imagine it, it’s almost certainly happening.

Couldn’t we meet at Dagda – it’s just around the corner? Or maybe Summerhall?

Mia’s on her phone.

“Yeah, well, I dunno, Cosmo and Jess are going to be at the KartoffelYurt – probs easier if we go somewhere we all know, like a landmark?”

Cosmo, Jess and Mia are my friends (or versions of my friends, if any of you are wondering they don’t really map onto anyone specific.) They’re up from London to “DO” the Festival and they’re not alone. Every year the population of Edinburgh triples in August for the largest arts festival in the world. It is spectacular, and the reason that Edinburgh has such amazing arts infrastructure well beyond the requirements of such a small city the rest of the year round. Hosting an event of this magnitude also gives our city finances a real shot in the arm, not only from licensing done by the council, but also through money taken by so many small businesses. Like bookshops. Thank you for your custom.

I’m a bookseller. Booksellers tend to be arty types. You probably imagine I’m darting around dozens of shows this month, drinking it all in, swimming in the cerulean sea of Fringe Society but this is not so. I struggle with crowds and unfamiliar situations – if I make it to three or four shows I’d be surprised. Don’t tell anyone – it’ll destroy my arts cred. Thing is though that when chatting with another bookseller recently I was surprised to discover she doesn’t do much with the festival either. And just now, on the radio, an interviewee stated that she was a local, and so the festival wasn’t really for her. I started to wonder if any residents go to these gigs at all.

The entire landscape of Edinburgh changes at this time of year – yes there is that infrastructure we use all the year round, but a whole bunch of other stuff is parachuted in and opened up and dusted down. There’s a liminal Fringe City that Mia, Cosmo and Jess know better than I do because this is the only time of year they come to Edinburgh and it was built for them. And it’s cool – it’s a carnival, a floating market, filled with secrets and pleasures, the wonderful and the weird. There are tents and walkways, we get access to spaces normally boarded up – is that a double decker bus converted into a theatre? Has somebody made a public toilet an official venue? Watch out, here comes another chainsaw-juggling unicyclist!

These spaces all need staffing, and so we find students – some up from elsewhere to “DO” the Fringe, some arrived a month early for their studies to rake in a bit of extra casheesh pulling pints and checking tickets and flashing lanyards until the semester commences. And it’s fun for them – I know because I’ve sort of done it. Back in 2007 and 2008 I volunteered at “Fringe Sunday” – a bunch of performance tents pitched on the Meadows for the second Sunday of August where acts would show excerpts of their shows for free. It was a brilliant idea – a little try-before-you-buy to entice attendees. I would dash about putting out folding chairs, running errands for the “Stage Directors” of each tent, and spent a certain amount of time feeling all official regulating the crowds and showing off my lanyard. I got a tshirt too. And I saw a bunch of stuff.

Do you see the difference though? I was a 16 year old volunteer. I had fun for the day, I got a free tshirt, I got a few free underage beers at the after party and grabbed the last train back out to the ancestral pile in Falkirk where I tried to not look too pished in front of my parents. I don’t think anyone was getting paid at Fringe Sunday, it was done for the love of it and on a shoestring, and it popped up and popped down, a delightful bit of Festival Ephemera.

Workmen in Dorset have been hand crafting the enormous light-up fibreglass potato that traditionally crowns the KartoffelYurt. Weeks before the previews the bars, the tents, the spaces in the squares have been assembled, decked with lights and, for some reason, astroturfed. These spaces have stood, complete but empty, for weeks, and as I’ve cycled by them I’ve been ruminating on the colossal amount of money it takes to get all that up, and the colossal amount more these companies hope to take. There is money to be made from food and drink and accommodation even if there’s not a lot of money to be made from shows – all competing for audience, so many of them “free” until the performer begs you stick a fiver in their hat at the end. As the festival has grown so too has this industry, and yes they’ll need to pay the council various fees but lets face it, most of the profits go to the fat felines. And Fringe Sunday? 2008 was the last year it ran.

What do I know? Well I can tell you about the wee part of the Fringe I’m involved in now – the ALT Book Fringe, a series of free (actually free, we won’t beg you for change) events put on by local bookshops Argonaut, Lighthouse & Typewronger. (Notice how in that order the shops spell “ALT”? I did that bit.) These three shops have coordinated to run over forty events throughout the Festival, showcasing not only big name authors but also lesser known writers and publishers that might struggle to get into the main Festival program.

Whereas the Book Festival has to rent a venue and pay staff and authors, ALT Book Fringe relies on the fact that the shops would be open anyway and our events are really short and don’t disrupt business too much. Authors are often in town for the main festival anyway, and though we can’t afford to pay them the events take only a small portion of their time, and publishers would be touring them round indie bookshops anyway so why not do it under the ALT Book Fringe Banner?

The Book Festival can learn from this. Now that they’re no longer taking money from Bailey Gifford (a bunch of investment lawyers that for some reason seem to have funded a lot of arts stuff for the last few years but have recently fallen out of favour – that’s another article) they’ll need to economise. The Book Festival should reach out to all the wee indie bookshops in Edinburgh, and the big ones like Blackwells and Waterstones and Topping & Company, and organise a Book Festival that doesn’t waste money on a venue, doesn’t hire new staff, but just uses the existing literary infrastructure – the shops.

The Book Festival organisation wouldn’t make money off book sales, but they wouldn’t lose money as the shops would have venue costs anyway and won’t need to charge the Festival as they’ll be benefiting from sales, and future sales of signed copies. Then the only thing in need of funding aside from some admin would be the author fees – you can usually lean on publishers to fund things like accommodation and travel, especially if you let them boast about it on social media. If the ALT gang can coordinate and program over forty events off the back of their phones whilst working at their tills, surely a savvy Book Festival Convenor could spend the year wrangling the different shops as venues or liaising with shops to organise events in venues they already have a relationship with. It would mean there’s no centralised hub for the Book Festival, but that would mean attendees would be forced to, I don’t know, go out into Edinburgh and see a bunch of bookshops. I feel that’s better.

Now I know what would work in my own wee sector, but I feel that sort of thing needs to happen across the whole Festival. Could the bars and food trucks be run by local arts groups for instance? Summerhall houses a brewery, a distillery, a pub and a cafe – why not give them the concession to run the various squares and beer gardens? Can we have some rules on minimum pricing for gigs – bring back Fringe Sunday for those who want to see a bunch of free stuff, but have a minimum events charge so acts aren’t competing with free the rest of the time? Can we get an Edinburgh Residents Ticket Book that gives you free access to a certain number of shows if you just so happen to live here all the year round? Can some of the money from licensing be put into a Binmen’s Bonus – as they have to deal with three times as much rubbish in August, why not make that the time of year they get an extra bit of cash? I don’t think they’d chose this month in particular to strike if we did that.

Of course, I am but a humble bookseller. I don’t run the arts scene, I just live here. What the hell are you eating?

“It’s like a potato, but spiralized and fried on a stick and it has like an IRN BRU glaze?”

Mia and I are back at the KartoffelYurt. How was Jack the Ripper?

“Meh, pretty good. Kind of what you’d expect. Old-school.”

One of the teenage babies is wandering around looking for the other two.

Fuckit, I think there’s just time for me to get a BRU-Tato before we go in to see Dennis Nielsen. Well, you gotta support local after all…