1 What is your Fringe show about?

Goldfish is about memory loss, women’s health, and my struggle with a chronic health condition that affects my memory.  It is also about why women aren’t believed as readily, and why their memories are questioned when it comes to their lived experience. I also talk about sexual harassment, and I have put a trigger warning on the show because of this. It is funny, funny, funny but contains some personal stories and is not for children.

2 How many times/many years have you appeared at the Fringe?

Many years ago, I appeared as an actor in some truly experimental spirit of the fringe type plays that were filled with drama, mainly off-stage. As a stand-up Goldfish is my 3rd one hour show. My debut show ‘Broad Shoulders’ told the story of finding my birth family as an adoptee; I accidentally found them through ancestry dna. My second show ‘Late Developer’ was a straight stand-up show about starting comedy at 40. Goldfish has a very different theme and is a combination of hard hitting stand-up and story-telling.

3 What’s your most memorable moment from the Fringe?

I met Caroline Aherne in Greyfriars Bobby, very many years ago. My pal was going out with one of her mates, Bob Dillinger. We had travelled up from Manchester to watch them in a works white transit van that my mate had, and we positioned sleeping bags around an angle-grinder. We saw her perform and the atmosphere around her even back then was palpable. I will never forget standing in the Pleasence Courtyard at 19 and feeling part of something, waiting to go and watch Caroline Aherne. I moved to Edinburgh later that year thinking the festival was a constant event and the cultural Centre of the universe. Caroline went back to Manchester and became the legend that she was and is.

4 What’s the worst thing about the Fringe?

The stairs in tenements. I salute you all that live on the top floor and I did, on and off for my 15-year residence in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Those buildings can be beautiful, but I am no longer built for those stairs.

5 If you were not a performer what would you be doing?

I have done so many jobs from cleaning to working in criminal justice, from homelessness to bar work. I love supporting people with additional needs and I spent many years working in special education as an arts worker and in colleges. I chose to work with people with additional needs at school for work experience and I was drawn to it. It isn’t so much work I think, as a privilege; it can make your soul sing. I sometimes find stand-up a little too ego driven and wonder if I shouldn’t be doing that kind of work again but realistically, I loved the ‘work’ but I didn’t like the education setting, I wasn’t good at that bit. I am creative and scatter brained and not good with the routine you need alongside the knowledge and creativity. I admire teachers enormously; it is a vocation.

6 How do you prepare for a performance?

I go on a fizzy water fast 3 hours prior, it used to be diet coke, but I couldn’t sleep.

I say to my partner in a teenager voice: ‘I don’t want to do it’, he rolls his eyes and says you will be off stage in 3 hours delighted with yourself, now get out of the house, some of us have real jobs!

Then I peek at the audience and silently say ‘I love you’ in the desperate hope they will love me back.

I do the gig and if it’s gone well, I may treat myself to an egg and cress sandwich. It used to be burgers, but my cholesterol was so high I was banned from giving blood.

7 Favourite thing about being in Edinburgh?

My son, who lives there now. He followed the family tradition of moving from Manchester to Edinburgh, only he had a plan and went to university, good lad!

8What’s the most Scottish thing you’ve ever done?

This is embarrassing but we once staged a Scottish hen ‘pots & pans’ where we dressed up and did a pub crawl round Edinburgh with a pretend ‘bride’ to raise money for one of our experimental theatre shows. My pal Laverne played it to a tee, she is from Edinburgh, and we made quite a bit of cash. I am mortified but it was pre a ‘go-fund’ me page.

9 Favourite Scottish food/drink?

I love Cullen Skink. It sounds confusing, and I would pay to hear an American order it off a menu; ‘What is this…they eat skunk here?’, but it is delicious; so warming and creamy and delicious.

10 Sum up your show in three words

Hilarious, Ouch, Ahh

Nina Gilligan new stand-up show ‘Goldfish’ is at the Just The Tonic Sub-Atomic at the Nucleus @ 8.40pm for tickets go to www.edfringe.com