Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Postcard from Edinburgh - Leaflets


So, you’ve made it. You’ve brought your fabulous, world-changing show that’s going to make you a star to Edinburgh. But how are you going to let the world know about it, especially when there are thousands of other shows here?

Grabbing the camera of a BBC crew here to cover the festival is one idea, as is trying to bribe your way to a decent review in ‘the Scotsman’ but, generally, you’ll be out and about trying to force an uncaring and apathetic public to take a leaflet about your show that, if they bother to read it, will convince them that you are worth an hour of their life and a tenner of their money.

Or you could stick your leaflet, probably on top of somebody else’s, on one of the leaflet towers that adorn the Royal Mile. Or you could just get a girl in a skimpy top to hand them out.


How do you avoid leaflets? It’s not enough to just keep your head down, or even to extend your palm and straight arm like a rugby player, the kids doing the leafleting are young, fit, keen and eager. No, you’d got to accept you are going to have to accept at least thirty to forty leaflets when you, say, pop out to the newsagents or go to the loo in a pub. The best tactic is to tailor your response, so for instance, if an earnest young woman is trying to give you a leaflet about a show depicting the struggles of a union organiser in south America, consisting of mime, dance and puppets, then asking ‘any knob gags?’ may just get you off the hook. Warning: trained dancers can kick like mules.

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Postcard from Edinburgh - The ladies' special

Café Piccante in Edinburgh is quite a place. It has very good food, but that’s not why I love it. It does deep fried mars bar, but that’s not why I love it. It’s licensed, but that’s not it…okay, so it is a bit.

No, the reason that Cafe Piccante deserves to be visited and patronised by every right thinking person everywhere is that at the end of the many choices of food listed there on the board above the counter, is the ‘ladies' special’.

The ladies' special is chips and cheese and a glass of wine.

Let’s take those one at a time. Chips and cheese? Chips and cheese! Chips. And cheese. This I now know to be chips with grated cheese melted on top of it. I saw a lady come in, order this and then sit down and eat it with every indication of relish. Thinking about it, what’s so odd? In the wild West Midlands we love our chips and curry sauce (better for avoiding a hangover than not actually drinking), and in t’north they love their chips and gravy. Trust the classy Edinburgh crowd to come up with a development where you can actually add another solid…that then goes to a liquid state!

But it’s the glass of wine with the ladies special that really makes it for me. That touch of class that hints that you also need to be a wee bitty pished to really enjoy your chips and cheese.

The mans' special, by the way, was a burger and a bottle of beer. What’s so fucking special about that? I want my glass of wine!

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Monday, September 28, 2009

Postcard from Edinburgh - Tartan tat an' aw' that


Scotland's major export is, I'm now convinced, not tartan or tweed or scotch or oil or wry humour or racial stereotypes or shortbread or aggression or red hair or even tourists that go from blue to red to flaming balls of flaking skin in the Mediterranean sunshine. No, based on the evidence of my recent stay in Edinburgh, Scotland's main export is happy Japanese people.

There are a hell of a lot of Japanese people in Edinburgh and most of them seem to be coming out of tartan tat shops with carrier bags so laden with tartan and shortbread you think they are going to need a fleet of wheelbarrows to get all that shit back to the hotel.

Every time you walk past an Edinburgh tat shop, (which is every second shop on the Royal Mile) there is a happy family of Japanese tourists exiting, laden with bags brimming with tartan products. All I can think is that there must be a hell of a lot of obscure clans; the MacFuji's, the MacKunioshi's and the MacHiroshogi's must be delighted to discover their family tartan exists here in Edinburgh, at such reasonable prices! God alone knows what downtown Tokyo looks like when everyone decides to wear the gear they bought on holiday, Seven Samurai meets Braveheart.

Not that I was immune to the charms of tartan tat (tatan?) myself. I now own the most expensive shortbread in the world, not because it is made from organic panda harvested at the full moon by Madonna but rather because I loaded up on so many ‘memories of Scotland’ (ironic given that the most famous Scottish export is responsible for memory lapses when enjoyed in quantity) that on the flight* home I had to pay excess baggage. It may have been the flags or the tee shirt or the bottle of booze (oops) but I know, just KNOW, it was the shortbread. Or the Jimmy wig.

*That’s right, I took a domestic flight. Carbon footprint like a clown me.

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Sunday, September 27, 2009

Postcard from Edinburgh - Wynds and chips


It’s ironic that in a city that has been blessed with so many pubs, clubs, bars and drinking dens there are just so many alleys, alleyways, closes, wynds and passages. These offer a test of navigation at the best of times in broad daylight and stone cold sober but at night, after a few pints, they become about as easy to negotiate as a treetop confidence course.


With the twists, turns, crooks and bends you’d be forgiven for thinking that the city planners drew on MC Escher as their inspiration.

The odd thing is though that they really do work. They save you having to walk all the way round a block of grand buildings to get to where you are going to. You cut from one street to another with the sort of speed you’d normally associate with some sort of dimensional fold in space, or teleportation, rather than a short cobbled alley. This does shave time off of your journey and leave give you a few precious minutes for a sneaky pint. (Although why wait; the delightfully named ‘Fleshmarket Close’ comes with its own pub, the Half Way House, either half way up, or down, the close).


In some sort of weird twist of evolution, Edinburgh’s cuisine has adapted to try aand soak up the booze and so prevent the city’s drinking population from maiming themselves. Any kind of alcohol, from sherry to the stuff they preserve weird specimens in down the lab, has met its match when it comes to a pie supper or a fish supper. That’s to say nothing of the fabled delicacy that is the deep fried mars bar.

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Edinburgh

Make no mistake, Edinburgh is a marvellous place. It’s a city that appears to have been woven out of imagination, made real by the industry that the Scots are justly famous for. It’s like nowhere else on Earth and nowhere elsse on Earth could be like this, the age of making cities like this a reality has gone, faded. Even if we still had the skill, we don’t have the vision or the drive. It’s a gothic, palladian fairytale and it’s just stunning. There were a thousand shows here for the festival but the star is the city itself.

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Postcard from Norfolk – Potato vodka


In the small, charming, Georgian town of Holt, where there is one posh shop for every 0.7 people, there’s a fabulous grocers. It sells all sorts of stuff. If you do your weekly food shop in a supermarket, then you are probably exposed to a limited range of stuff, because supermarkets buy food in huge, American-sized portion amounts and so are able to offer you a trolly load of crisps for a fiver because they have aisles full of crisps. But if you look closely, you’ll see that there are only three or four varieties of crisp, but a hell of a lot of packets and, hey, they are crisps, so who cares.

Passing the shop window I see a familiar logo on an unfamiliar product. It’s the Tyrrells logo. Tyrrells are a Herefordshire based crisp company that recently became a bit famous because they refused to let Tesco stock their product, reportedly because they did not like the way Tesco treated small farmers and wanted nothing to do with the company, but I suspect in reality because they did not want the sort of loon faced chavs who listlessly chew crisps in an open mouthed, slack-jawed ruminating manner before throwing the packet away onto the street to be eating their product when they do so. And very good crisps they make too.

This time, the logo was on a bottle of clear spirit. Ah ha, either they’ve gone into producing water, of that’s potato vodka.

Running into the shop I accosted the man behind the counter and asked if it was made by the self same sorts that made the crisps. He believed so. What was the vodka like, had he tried it? Indeed he had, it was smooth and creamy. Well, I opined like a true barbarian, if it’s half as good as their crisps, I’d be a happy man.

Doing a good job of trying to conceal his horror that anyone would pollute their palate with crisps when they could be marinating it in vodka, he sold me a bottle.

Like many bottles of spirits bought on holiday, this one went into the cupboard and probably would have stayed there with the other yellow, green and red concoctions bought in a moment of madness abroad that makes you think you can recreate the magic of a foreign place simply through alcohol, when the truth is you need alcohol served from a vastly overpriced mini-bar to really achieve the effect, or when you eventually get drunk enough for a traffic light themed drinking game. However, one evening I remembered it and poured myself a shot-glass full. Hummn, it was indeed smooth, and creamy. But what it was most of all was a glass of transparent spirit made from whatever they have left over when they have finished making the crisps. Gasping and shuddering, I followed up with a glass of water.

Okay, I wonder what it adds to a coke? What it added was alcohol, which is probably not what the people who invented coke had in mind when they innocently blended cocaine, sugar and caffeine, no, they wanted a stimulating drink, 110% global market share and the heads of those bastards at Pepsi on a spike at the factory gates.

All was going well until, bored one evening, I decided to enhance the film I was watching through the simple addition of alcohol. It must have been a very bad film or a very good vodka and coke, or several very good vodkas and cokes because the next morning the bottle was more or less empty and I was convinced that the cultivation of the potatoes, the setting up of the crisp company as some sort of front, the distilling of the vodka, the bottling and the placing of the bottle strategically in the window of the shop I was passing was all simply an elaborate plot to kill me with hangover.

A couple of days and a lot of paracetamol later I resolved to avoid the stuff in future. Some drinks are simply to be avoided and anything that is potato based and probably made in a tin bath has to be near the top of the list, right up there with the lemoncello my mother-in-law makes, from a recipe she has on a tea towel she bought on holiday in Sorrento!

Still, if they bring out a prawn cocktail flavoured liqueur version, I could be tempted.

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