– In the 18th century, the punishment for drinking after hours in Edinburgh was to be placed on a wooden horse with heavy irons on each foot and a drinking vessel on your head.

– St Stephen’s Church possesses the longest clock pendulum in Europe: it’s 65 feet in length, about the same as a prehistoric megalodon shark.

– The world records for most legs waxed in one hour, fastest time to string a tennis racket, and largest game of What’s The Time Mr Wolf? were all set in Edinburgh.

– 25,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, you could walk from Edinburgh to Oslo across the ice.

– Dolly The Sheep has her own blue plaque in Edinburgh.

– The Wig Club, founded in Edinburgh in 1775, was a gentlemen’s sex club, named after the club relic, a wig woven from the pubic hair of Charles II’s mistresses.

– When travelling from London to Edinburgh by stagecoach 300 years ago, the baggage allowance was the same as when travelling from London to Edinburgh via Ryanair today.

– The tower clock of the Balmoral Hotel runs three minutes fast so that people rushing to Waverley don’t miss their trains; it’s usually put right for New Year’s Eve, but in 2020 the hotel didn’t adjust it for Hogmanay, explaining ‘we would gladly have three minutes less of 2020’.

– While studying at Edinburgh University, Gordon Brown dated the Crown Princess of Romania.

– Cadbury 99 Flake was named after number 99 Portobello High Street, where an ice-cream vendor opened a shop in 1922 and sold the first one (there are a couple of competing claims, but this one is according to the granddaughter of the man who first sold them in Portobello, so we choose to believe it!).

– In the late 18th century, the city of Edinburgh gave 12 gallons of whisky a year to Edinburgh University Anatomy Museum for the purpose of preserving medical specimens.

– The colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King’s Guard lives at Edinburgh Zoo; he’s called Major General Sir Nils Olaf, baron of the Bouvet Islands, and he is a penguin.

– In 1895, Lilian Lindsay became the first woman to qualify as a dentist in the UK; when she took up her role at Edinburgh’s Dental Hospital, one of the staff complained that she was ‘taking the bread out of some poor fellow’s mouth’.

– The Royal Mile is actually one mile and 107 yards long, but that’s at least more accurate than Blackpool’s Golden Mile which is 1.6 miles long, and Manchester’s Curry Mile which is about 400 metres.

– Quidditch, digestive biscuits and overdrafts were all invented in Edinburgh.

No Such Thing As A Fish, Edinburgh Playhouse, 14 August, 8pm; We Can Be Weirdos Live With Dan Schreiber, Underbelly Bristo Square, 3–7 August, 7pm.