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So where does the city become in those three weeks of August? Prague or Budapest have fewer Eastern European accents than Edinburgh once Richard Demarco's programme gets running. Describing it as unique is a lazy way out, but it certainly isn't the Edinburgh you encounter at any other time of the year, or anywhere else. Avignon's festival is as frantic, but nowhere near as vast. The mardi gras in New Orleans is as crazy, but nothing like as sustained. Douce Edinburgh's festival schizophrenia is multiple and wonderfully incurable.

This, of course, has an effect on anyone within the vicinity. There is a population upheaval. Residents move out. Thespians take a revolving tenure, though few can remember where they slept the night before, or with whom. A few years ago I met a married couple in tow with a transsexual who was wavering between being Colin or Sacha, though his high-heeled stilettos seemed to be making a stab for the latter.

They were convinced that they were staying in a caravan parked up off Lothian Road, though they never showed any inclination to want to stop partying long enough to ever find it again. There is a perennial accommodation currency of swops and exchanges generated by persons who booked hotel rooms or who were given flats with their performance contract for the duration, but who have lost the need ever to return there, for any amount of reasons.

Even if you have the kind of tenacious sense of identity that allows you to still remember who you are as you enter the third week, you can be certain that this will be challenged all the way. I was surprised one year when the excellent one-man show artist Jack Klaff stopped me in Rose Street. He had seen me at his show the other night, which was true. But he also liked my poetry, which seemed unlikely. After a while it became apparent he thought I was Seamus Heaney. This is a flattering error, since Heaney writes like a dream and I write like a snooze on a 37 bus, but there is a superficial, silver-haired, resemblance. Heaney is 10 years my senior, ruddier of complexion, a few pounds heavier and more mischievous around the eyes. Towards the end of Edinburgh Festivals I could be taken for his less alert older brother.

In such a febrile atmosphere it would be entirely possible to take in a full Edinburgh Festival experience without seeing a single show, and there are many who swear this is the only way to cope with it. For several years as a theatre critic I used to wonder how anyone could afford to pay their way into more than a couple of performances, and how remote were their chances of finding that elusive gem I might finally stumble across after suffering 50-odd duds.

There is something truly catastrophic about the first five minutes of a bad piece of theatre, or a chronically unfunny comedian. You can see the next 90 minutes looming up in front of you as a monument to wasted opportunity when there are a hundred other shows all starting within half a square mile of the venue you have haplessly descended upon. You quickly develop a ruthlessness. You have to get out, sparing neither the feelings of the performers nor the comfort of the audience. These are moments of the most intense fear and loathing. It is like acute claustrophobia. Nothing will restrain you in that place for a moment longer of this folly.

I was once trapped in a show which featured three naked women who appeared to be playing the parts of a trio of distressed apes. After seven minutes of shrieking and grunting, and much hobbling about in vaguely simian attitudes, it did not seem to be going anywhere. It was not going well at all. That I had to escape went without saying, but there were logistical problems. I was on the inside end of a row of audience who were either transfixed or utterly petrified. It was difficult to tell which.

Once I got them all up to let me pass I had to negotiate the only passage available, which took me down central steps to join the agitated performers on stage. Beyond them lay the exit. I tried to close the door gently behind me, but the sense of release could not have been more glorious than if I had scaled my way out of Alcatraz.

Before I became professionally eligible for review tickets this self-preservation streak extended also to getting into performances free, if at all possible. A friend had made me promise to take her to a concert in the Queen's Hall and I thought I might try to take advantage of the fact that our then features editor, Raymond Gardner, had suddenly become indisposed. I escorted the lady up to the press desk and breezily requested the tickets for Mr Gardner, not knowing if he had reserved any, but chancing my arm. Luck was with this enterprise. We took our seats, and remarked on Raymond's uncanny ability to always reserve the best berths in the house.

This pleasant windfall was rudely broken by the arrival of the celebrity for whom the seats had been intended. The composer/conductor John Eliot Gardiner and his wife stood at a discreet distance while the management attempted to clear up the misunderstanding.

Sometimes, however, there is just no way out. My ultimate Edinburgh Festival experience arrived in 1992. I had always been in search of collectors' items, and an absolute devotee of obscure performances in strange languages. A chance conversation had alerted me to a play translated into Albanian by the City Theatre Company of Prizren in Kosova. It was playing in a masonic hall in Morningside. I went up and bought a ticket for the performance due in 20 minutes. How many had they sold? One. Mine. ``The company have come a long way to play at the Edinburgh Festival,'' I was told gravely. ``They have decided that the performance will go ahead.'' It lasted an hour. I gave them a standing ovation. They gave me one back.

Then they wanted me to discuss the performance with them through a translator. That lasted another hour. I told them it had been a great privilege to have seen their show. They said that even playing to an audience of one was worthwhile, if it helped to tell the world anything about the plight of the Kosova enclave in former Yugoslavia. I promised to tell all my friends to come.

``The performance was chilling and eerie,'' I note they have quoted from the piece I wrote then. It is on a release that I noticed among the hundreds that come piling into the office at this time of the year competing for pre-publicity attention before the start of another Festival. The company is now The Albanian Theatre Company. It is performing Eternity, written and directed by Luljeta Ceku, who was sacked as the theatre director in Prizren by the Serbian government because of her political views. Since 1992 she has been living in political exile in London. This is her first return to Edinburgh.

Set alongside the desperation of the increasingly commercial Fringe, the fame-seekers, the route-to-stardom-hunters, the nasty rip-off merchants, the ``celebrity'' shows and the latest sensations, it is vital that the Edinburgh Festival still has a place for someone like Luljeta Ceku. This year she will take her company to the Demarco Theatre, where she will be in the best hands to find a family of friends and supporters.

The Demarco Theatre might have spread itself geographically in recent years to present shows in Fife and Dundee, but it itself has become something of a cultural enclave in an Edinburgh Festival that has rotated curiously. Since the arrival of Brian McMaster, the official Festival programme offers more that is genuinely exciting and exploratory than the Fringe, which has become increasingly sterile and safe. It used to be the other way about, but the Fringe has become prey to big-venue syndrome. Preposterous Demarco and his beautifully impractical visions of what a real festival experience should be about have remained an exception, possibly an anachronism of excitement, but an unflagging catalyst.

So, what is this Edinburgh Festival experience? It could be about trying to establish a new world record for the number of shows you can see in the three weeks, or it could be about sitting in pubs and restaurants with friends, always planning to call a taxi to get you to that show you promised to go and see, but never quite making it. It could be about meeting up with a group of people that you never see at any other time of the year or in any other place, but with whom you will forever make this annual reconnaissance. Or it will be hundreds of people that you will encounter fleetingly along the way, scurrying between one venue and the next, who you will never see again for the rest of your life, but with whom you have shared moments of this continuing adventure.