I have an ear worm.

It’s the Proclaimers singing ‘It’s over and done wi’ it’s over and done wi’, with a wee refrain of ‘Edinburgh, no more.’

So, now that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe gig has been and gone, I’ve been thinking about that cliché, ‘You’re only as good as your last performance’. Well Monday was the final show, but what with a wee audience; always more subdued and self-conscious, I’ve decided to consider the weekend, when we had two big, noisy audiences, as my last gigs.

I would hate to think I would deliberately do a different gig to a subdued audience than a raucous one, but you just do! An audible audience energises you. It’s truly a dialogue; you feed each other back and forth.

I’m a typical Glasgow audience member, when I appreciate a show, I whoop and at the end and clap with my hands high up in front of me, so the players can hear and see them! I want folk like me in my audience!

The Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world and it felt like it! This year 2,838,839 people turned up to see 3500 shows. They say the average number for an audience for any show is six – I don’t know if that’s true but for sure the competition is fierce.

Of course, the big guns who have a publicity arsenal behind them always sell out. It’s only we foot soldiers who compete for ticket sales. For us it was down to word of mouth and ‘fliering’.

Near me there’s a posh pizza place that’s always stowed out. Dominos, across the road, has now stationed a poor wee guy outside it with a sandwich board that says on it “any pizza £5.99!”

I feel for him, as I’ve done plenty of ‘fliering’ for shows in my lifetime – and this year was no exception.

There was all manner of styles to see. The machine gunners, who just spayed their stuff on the table in front of you. Then there were the folk who would spot their target and home in, giving lots of bullet points and eye contact. Then there were the stealth fliers; they come from nowhere and before you know it you’re clutching a batch of leaflets for just about every show in town!

We figured we played to about 1200 folk over the month and got a few, four-star reviews and a five-star one from Fred MacAulay!

As chuffed as we were with our reviews it was reading stuff on social media from the folk who really “got it” that meant the most.

‘In for A Penny’, is a comedy that questions the justice system’s criminalising of poverty – especially of women – and our appetite for punishment, when surely, we ought to try to understand causality and prevention. We need to change this if only to stop innocent kids going into care. Great news is, that after this stint, we have started a dialogue about taking the piece into prisons.

We’ll be working with people who are already campaigning in the field of women and the justice system. And there’s talk of a tour!

Now that it feels like the end of the beginning of something, I’d like to give a wee shout out to Karen Koren and her team at the Gilded Balloon and say thanks for taking us in.

And finally...

You know you are old when shopping for a chair, you start looking at recliners.