A metal-barred gate with squawk-box suggests that visiting hours may be restricted. The garden looks uncared-for, the scullery (where her youngest daughter Sarah presses the buzzer to let you in), a picture of lampless gloom. This unpromising territory has for two decades been the domain of two of the literary world’s great eccentrics: Colin Haycraft, the late publisher who moved his company, Duckworth, to the Old Piano Factory in this street in 1972, and his wife Anna, known to nom-de-plumery as Alice Thomas Ellis since the publication of her first novel The Sin Eater in 1977. Dust off any copy of the Guinness Book of Records, look up “Festivals: Enormous” and there she blows: 200 venues, 660 theatrical groups, 9,000 performers and a zillion shows: everything from Waiting for Godot in German to a semi-naked bloke doing acrobatics in a bath off the castle battlements.

And who pays for this artistic outpouring? A mysterious government department? The punters? No By and large it is the performers themselves. I don’t like different foods to touch each other and, by the end, I was almost in tears. In fact, I retired to my boudoir, where I ordered a cheese and tomato sandwich and waited with glistening eyes for the next Saturday and a night having Hooch spilt on me down the pub.. It’s official – the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is huge.

“I’m not Egon Ronay!” I wanted to cry, “I’m a schmendrick who eats over the sink so I won’t have to wash any dishes!”And the food! Five courses A sorbet between the starter and main course. Fish with a different fish inside and weird, unidentified green bits on top. I don’t know what they were, so you have to trust me, they were weird. For dessert – holy, sacred, most dear to my heart desert, which should be a BIG CHOCOLATE CAKE or some ICE-CREAM or a BOUNTY BAR – I had to eat alcohol-soaked biscuits on vanilla-pod ice-cream in a pool of creme anglaise and raspberry coulis, with extra cream and berries on stalks This was not easy for me.