Comic relief

Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant performance artists. For, in the fag days of August, as the Fringe dies — it will be reanimated next year by the blood of Citizen Puppet and Nicholas Parsons — assorted actors and comics and cabaret artists and mime artists and circus artists and ballet dancers and tap dancers and flute players and face painters and sketch performers and one-woman-show specialists (expiating rejection by standing in bins) and the guy who dresses up as Darth Vader are more ulcer than human being; and that is before we get to the clowns, who are in a special sub-section of desolation, even if Puddles Pity Party did get five stars. (‘Like Tom Jones, but taller — and dressed as a clown.’) Even people who make balloon animals are having an existential crisis; their hands move, twisting the balloons into, say, small neon-pink dogs, but their eyes are dead.

Mum’s is near the Gilded Balloon and the Pleasance Dome, ideally placed for performers addled by their drug of choice, which is hope. It is faintly American-diner and retro-misogynist in style. It has a gaudy sign with a wonky S (no Mum is perfect, you see) and a publicity board with a photograph of a bald Don Draper being presented with sausage and mash by a sexy Scottish housewife. Her sausages are faintly obscene.

Emma Peel is on the door of the girls’ loos, although no one who eats regularly at Mum’s should wear a leather catsuit, although they probably could anyway, such is its aura of acceptance; Michael Caine is on the boys’, although I doubt he knows it.