The comedy calendar can take some getting used to.

You may not have clocked this anomaly before, but comedians work on a different timescale to the rest of us. Look at this last few months: while the average British family takes advantage of the school holidays and heads off on holiday in August, for a big percentage of UK-based comedians that's the most intense and stressful few weeks of their year, as they take a show up to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Then when everyone heads back to work or school in early September, they take a break, so their post-holiday blues happen weeks after everyone else. And when they eventually get home, they're discombobulated due to not having the focus of a new show to play with, anymore. How do you deal with that? Well, nowadays you can always roll the dice with some interactive escapism: online casino games include Aztec, Egyptian and tropical themes, to bring some exotic excitement into the home.

Of course, one benefit to getting back after weeks away is catching up on all the zeitgeist-friendly shows you've missed while galivanting about - which is particularly important when you humorously comment on that stuff for a living. Indeed, you can even watch Netflix via a VPN and catch up on loads of not-available-here shows. With a virtual private network you convince your computer that it's in a foreign country, even if you're both back in, say, Wolverhampton.

Your jobbing live comedians tend to be on a totally different hourly time zone to most other people, too, waiting around all day to then work in the evenings. At least nowadays we have the web - where the whole world is playing stuff online, at once - and streaming services, so you can watch what you want, whenever you want.

Imagine what life was like for full-time comics in the earlier days of the circuit, in the 1980s, with just a Spectrum or Atari to play games on, offline, and a few films on VHS which they'd already seen 20 times. No wonder those acts did such weird stuff when they finally got on stage later; and thus alternative comedy was born, from boredom.

Of course, September can be a hectic schedule for comics too, if August went well. The Fringe and pre-Fringe is where many shows are discovered by TV types and venue bookers. After all of those previews in June and July, then a whole month in Edinburgh, a comedian could then find themselves with a nice long run at an arts theatre, or a development deal. It's good to be busy, really.

Traditionally, for regular working people, you then start to look forward to the Christmas holidays once the clocks go back. For comedians, Christmas is arguably an even busier and more stressful time than August, as the party season kicks in. This is where all of the kudos you accumulated during the year counts for nothing, as you're disrespected by a bunch of completely uninterested office workers who would much rather have gone to the pub.

You know when comedians have their own Christmas parties? January. It's a funny old life.