Getting the comedian, Radio 4 presenter and writer Robin Ince to North Berwick’s Fringe by the Sea – inspired by joining his spontaneous tour of second-hand bookshops during the Wigtown Book Festival two years ago – was a memorable exercise in ADHD event coordination. It involved months of plaintively pursuing him and the festival organiser, much last-minute improvisation, and wearing my squirrel-adorned sunhat as a beacon for lost attenders on the day. (What on earth made me also organise an ADHDers’ pre-event social meet-up in the park? Madness!) 150 tickets had vanished fast that week; my questions and flyers got misplaced; the mobile pinged with queries from confused ADHD festival-goers and ticket-seekers all day.
Robin, meanwhile, navigated the once-an-hour Edinburgh-North Berwick train timetable, postcodes and mobile maps with the kind of poetic befuddlement our Fringe by the Sea’s pop-up venues can provoke (like Brigadoon, they’re not visible on Googlemap… it all happens in the local park every August). This was between his lunchtime show and evening show in Edinburgh – 18 days of two different shows – following 160+ days of national book-promo touring. The man is inexhaustible. Thanks to my eagle-eyed husband Neil, Robin was eventually retrieved from a quiet side-street after a brief, wildflower-appreciating detour from the platform – just in time for a swift sound-check scarily close to the main event.
Inside the marquee, once I landed onstage as host and did a double-take at the crammed tentful of ADHD friends and allies, I abandoned reconstructing my lost question-list, made my peace with the soundscape of the Bluebells tuning up in the next tent, and just let the conversation flow. Robin was (of course) relaxed, responsive, funny and truthful about his ADHD discovery, his shedding of long-held anxieties, the recent discovery of his inner poet and the hope that his book might encourage us to show ourselves – and each other – a little more compassion. It’s sure to do that. We laughed, took verbal detours and connected in that refreshingly unscripted way neurodivergent brains so often do.
At the end: books signed, people smiling, Robin whisked away to catch the train back for his next show – and me, realising (again) that chaos can in fact be our gift. If you’re an ADHDer or simply curious, don’t miss Robin’s book, Weirdly Normal and Normally Weird. It’s a celebration of our quirks, our resilience and the delight of doing things a bit differently.
Carol Stobie, Procrastination Station Co-Director
August 2025
