The Garden of Earthly Delights.

And so it begins.

For the next month the Royal Mile will be home to jugglers, stiltwalkers, tourists, students with jazz hands, puppets, muppets, ventriloquists, students plying tourists with flyers, pipers, magicians, students braying in your ear, fire eaters, assorted acts wearing bowler hats: in short, the usual Fringe Festival characters - an assorted horde of lanyard-wearing grotesques more suited to the fantastic tableaux of Hieronymus Bosch than the ancient and weatherworn cobbles of the Old Town.