Look at those bad boys go! The Imps Youth Motorcycle Display Team do that pyramid thing. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty
And now, to check you've been paying attention at the back, it's time for a wee quizzlet. Which Edinburgh show features: (a) daredevil six-year-olds riding motorcycles; (b) a gang of hoodie-wearing anarchists enacting a desperate bid for power; (c) groups of moustachioed men dancing in formation?
It reads like a flier from the very straggliest edges of the Fringe, but the fact that this event has been booked up since March suggests otherwise. This is the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which plays for 24 nights to audiences - 8,700 each night - career mime artistes would kill for. And tonight's the night when I get to go! Yippee!
The box office warn me there's a big crowd in, but it's only after I sneak into the stadium - erected a tad precipitously on the top of Castle Mound - that I see they mean it literally. OK, I'm not a tall guy, but here enormous uniformed men with shoulders the width of bison bristle as far as the eye can see. I cast a nervous smile at a military policeman nearby, and he responds with an expression of icy disdain. I blush like the civilian dweeb I am, and stare guiltily into my notebook.
Fortunately the show's about to start. Braziers are a-burning on the castle walls, coloured lights are a-twinkling and a master of ceremonies is warming the audience up with some well-crafted, heritage-grade quips. Then the lights go down, there's a massive bang, and a noise like a thousand cuckolded hornets starts up.
This, deafeningly, is the massed pipes and drums of the controversially rebranded Royal Regiment of Scotland, inching forward from the castle gates and advancing across the parade ground. It's such a massive, eardrum-bursting sound that I wonder, briefly, if I can record it on my phone to prove such things exist in nature. Probably not. Get that on yer ringtone!
But it's easily topped by the kids' motorcycle display team. They're wearing cute little red jackets and enormous white helmets, and they're zipping around doing circles and saltires and all manner of death-defying formations. They're in sidecars. Doing wheelies. Being chased by police bikes. Look! Seventeen of them are squashed in a wobbly mobile pyramid. I can't bear to watch. As they're changing formation, one child falls off and bounds straight back up. "Don't worry, the imps bounce," chuckles the compere.
No time to tell you about the Royal Marines set (gloriously unnecessary abseiling to a bitchin' soundtrack) or the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force Steel Orchestra (men in crisp white uniforms showing their love for limbo dancing), still less the this-year-only bicentennial Trafalgar pageant.
You'll have to watch the Tattoo on TV instead; it's being broadcast on BBC1 next Saturday, August 27. I will be, along with 100 million others. And booking early for next year.
