As we all know, the Edinburgh Fringe is the world's largest gathering of poseurs, unfunny comedians and Oxbridge-educated over-privileged undergraduates.

For 4 weeks in August, Edinburgh city centre shopkeepers can increase prices, fleece tourists and sell tacky Scottish souvenir shite (which is usually made in China).

You can't get into your favourite bars because they're packed to the rafters with tourists who spend 3 hours drinking a pint of Heavy that a native would dispatch in 2 minutes flat.

You can't get into your favourite eateries because they're full of ill-educated eejits trying to work out what the Italian/French/Japanese/Murcan (delete as appropriate) equivalent of Stovies is and then trying to understand when the waiter eloquently informs them that it's "munce, tatties an' lard".

You can't drive on the roads because they're full of foreigners going the wrong way up one-way streets, or the council have decided to schedule the entire road repair programme between August 1st and August 30th.

You can't get home from work at a decent time because the entire public transport system is fucked-up by one-way street deviants and road works.

And you can't get a seat on a bus because some fucking foreigner is sitting in the bloody seat that you subsidise heavily through the bastarding exorbitant local taxation system.

So, you might as well go to a show. Here are FirstFoot's personal recommendations for the 2003 Fringe: