Therefore, you don't need to drink quite as fast in order to get moderately merry before you get flung inhospitably out onto the street as you do back home. Most city-centre pubs (and in Edinburgh, almost everywhere's in the city centre) open until 1 or 2am, and it's not even remotely difficult to find clubs and nightspots open considerably beyond that. La Belle Angele (on Hastie's Close, in the Cowgate), for example, is a lively and popular venue for the averagely trendy, and offers live music until 3am.

Or, more entertainingly, turn up post-show at the Ceilidh House (on the corner of the High Street and the North Bridge) with your busker's standard-issue guitar and bodhran under your arm and make your own hellish racket on three floors of interactive Celtic noise terror until 2am. (Although a well-placed source informs the Guide that it's not as good as it used to be now that it's been taken over by a major brewery, and recommends Sandy Bell's on Forrest Road as a "proper folky pub" instead. In the unlikely event that a "proper folky pub" is what you're after, rather than a nightmarish vision of boozed-up mayhem from Hades). Alternatively, take a stroll up George IV Bridge and check out the ludicrous range of vodkas in Bar Kohl, named after the popular German Chancellor.

Edinburgh, Britain's most European city, is also the only real bastion of the cafe society, and the dream-like notion of the licenced patisserie (beer and pastries in the same place? Surely we've all died and gone to Heaven) has taken a powerful hold. The just-hip Cafe Florentine (off the High Street, in the grand environs of the nearby High Court) should be open all night during the festival, while the 24-hour apple doughnuts at Anderson's in St Patrick's Street bear particularly close investigation. A bit hungrier? The St James' Oyster Bar on Calton Road (just behind Waverly train station) isn't just for fans of little shells with what looks like crab phlegm inside them, and they'll feed you up until 2 in the morning.

If just getting even more drunk than you already are isn't a priority, why not check out a movie? The Cameo on Home Street (up Lothian Road, just beyond Tollcross) is an absolutely beautiful old cinema, and shows late-night double bills (with a gently arthouse kind of bent) starting around midnight in the latter part of the week. And if you decide that you would still like to get smashed after all (perhaps after the popularly harrowing Betty Blue/Blue Velvet pairing still packing 'em in after all these years), there's a very civilised bar in the Cameo too.