Postcard from Edinburgh – Reviews

Al Murray the Pub Landlord’s Pub Quiz

Fucking. Genius. The cheapest ticket bought you the funniest show. Al Murray rebooted the format of his show (casual racism, sexism and remarks about pork scratchings) by incorporating an actual pub quiz. The audience are placed in groups of six and named after pubs (‘horse and plough’, ‘rose and crown’) and ‘compete for the meat’, a frozen chicken that the quizmaster rotates under the spotlight like the rotisserie from hell. Or Asda.

Laughed my arse off. As always the audience were part of the show. High point was when he noticed a woman drinking coffee and confiscated it (artificial stimulant), low point, shouting ‘oi, bloke with boffin hair’ at me and, on impulse, I turn around ‘No, don’t fucking look behind you’.

Jo Caulfield

Saw he last year accidentally, their year intentionally. Very, very good. Fairy Tales To Prepare You For Life = genius. Also, exactly as bitter as her audience about getting older.

Sarah Millican

Went based on radio performances. OKish. Do women still have to make jokes about M&S and cakes and chocolate? And being fat? Is it the law. Last twenty minutes dragged.

Laura Solon

Stone cold genius and really interesting to see in the flesh. Had the funniest joke of the festival (I still giggle randomly at it now every time I think of it and confidently predict I will continue to do so for a few months).

Reginald D Hunter

Oh. My. Starry. Eyed. Surprise. I love comics like this. Essentially, some comics in Edinburgh have been on telly shows like ‘Have I got news for you’. They are funny. They do not swear. RDH comes on stage and explains ‘television is business but stand-up is art’. This translates to: ‘I will now effbomb and ceeebomb’. Then he does.

He was good. True to his word things got a little uncomfortable at times and occasionally he was obviously trying out new stuff but hey, that’s OK.

The couple in front of me did not laugh once. I think that they were expecting the fellow from HIGNFY. Not some sweary fella. Reminded me of Eddie Murphy’s concert film ‘Delirious’ where half way through he acknowledges that a lot of people might have come along because he was quite funny in Beverley Hills Cop and that, frankly, he’s scaring the hell out of the children in the front row.

BBC Comedy presents

The outstanding show of the festival and the place where you see next year’s crop of fresh talent. We saw comedians coked off their head, comedians who took ill-advised loo breaks and comedians who were so good that while they were on stage entertaining us they were winning best newcomer elsewhere.

But be warned, we have sat in the front row before and been picked on. Then we have sat in the front row and not been picked on (a combination of ‘fuck off’ vibes and looking like you’re eager to chat). This time we set a record. Six rows back and we were picked on, after my wife pointed to me in a ‘who’s the tallest person in the room’ survey. I had to remain standing for a couple of minutes. The chap behind me was thrilled.

BBC comedy presents starts at eleven at night. Everyone is just getting warmed up. It’s great, it’s cheap and you can start dropping names NOW to show you are cool and hip. If you can remember the names.

The Tattoo

The second best show in Edinburgh. See that bloke with the pipes and the kilt. See the medals on his chest. Right, last week, he rammed those pipes up the arse of some child-raping teacher-killing al-Queerida scumbag. He is a piper and he makes the word safe for children. Crying yet?


You would be when the fireworks went off. I’m still picking bits of gunpowder out of my hair.

Impressionist gardens

The show of the festival. A blockbuster exhibition in that the queues for the tickets went round the block.

Until paint and patrons both became cheaper, the gardens that were painted were along the lines of commissions, many of which seemed keen to have the artist capture the strength and power of the landowners fountain.

As paint became cheaper and the middle class started to have the money to but paintings that they hadn’t commissioned, painters started painting the formal guardians that were springing up under the reign of Napoleon. The gardens may have been formal but the people were not.

The impressionists appeared to happen because paint got cheap. Especially green paint. Especially cabbage coloured green paint. The impressionists weren’t interested in registering the power of your fountain, they were more interested in conveying the frost on the cabbages of the allotment of the bloke who was too poor to buy their paintings. Cabbage green must have been a cheap coloured paint, or, possibly, cabbages were attractive to painters because there are a lot of paintings with cabbages.

But, to be honest, allotments and kitchen gardens are places of industry and passion, who could resist setting up and easel.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Castle

What’s more festival than seeing a show…having one cancelled. With time to spare we visited the castle.

Bloody. Hell.

OK. First off, the battlements. Huge cannons look over the city, ready to blow the hell out of anyone trying to open a Starbucks. They could now be manned by the many tourists who have their pictures taken next to them. But if ancient cannons aren’t your thing…they have the real deal, a functioning artillery piece that’s described as the ‘one o’ clock gun’ but is, when you think about it, a major artillery piece on the highest point in the centre of the city.

Next up, the stairs and ramps. If you managed to fight your way to the top of the castle, you bloody deserve to run the country. And that’s without an opposed attack.

Have to say though, like many castles, the weak point is attack through the gift shop.

The castle also holds the crown jewels, the ‘treasures of Scotland’. There was a little bit of debate about whether they were actually the real things. But, looking at the two huge safe doors that marked the only entrances to the room where they were kept and based on the idea that they are kept in the centre of a room in a castle, with eight foot thick walls, I can think of no better place to keep them.

Want to rip them off? Bring a siege tower. And an army.

Also, it has an audio tour. I bloody love an audio tour. You know what the sign of a good audio tour is? Mood music and sound effects. The section on the one o’clock gun starts with a huge ‘boom!’. Even as I shrieked like a girl, I loved it.

The Scottish national war memorial.


I am not sentimental, alright. It’s just that, like many of the other chaps who were visiting the spotless, dust-free war memorial that day, I have an allergy, that makes my eyes red and my nose runny. Must be allergic to marble.

The war memorial itself is astonishing. A casket containing the battle honours of the regiments sits atop a marble plinth, which is in turn mounted on the bare rock that rises out of a polished marble floor like a rock rising from a still ocean at night. This is the rock of the castle, the living rock of Scotland, the very roots of the country and the memories of the glorious dead, forever remembered, are directly connected to it.

For the record…just about held it together reading the inscription about the war dead being beyond hurt. Lip tremble time when I read the inscription about even the nameless being forever honoured, for their names are written in the book of God.

As I said, allergic to marble.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the hotel

Last year we were in an apartment ten minutes walk from the centre of town. You came out the front door, walked up to the street (basement flat), then it was a ten minute walk into the centre of the city, as the noise and bustlee and hurly-burly built round you. It was a lot like walking slowly into the sea, but without that whole ‘water reaches the genitals ouch ah’ moment.

The hotel was on the Royal mile and stepping out the front door was like stepping onto a moving car of a roller coaster. Barely had one cleared the door when a leaflet was thrust in your face. Shit, these people know where I live…do I have to go and see their show about, er, global warming expressed through dance.

Postcard from Edinburgh - the tram link

It’s still not finished.

(How to annoy an Edinburgh barman, ask him what shows he’s enjoyed. How to annoy an Edinburgh resident…ask them if the tram link is finished, but be prepared for a fifteen minute diatribe. My favourite reaction ‘we used to have trams, and they were great’. So they are putting them back, you must be pleased. ‘No.’)

Postcard from Edinburgh – a guide to festival tourist types

This is an international festival of culture. That explains why there are so many bloody foreigners about. By far the most obnoxious are the English, and in particular young English types who are here to put on a show. Maybe it’s disappointing audience figures, maybe it’s the reviews, maybe it’s the crushing revelation that not only is the world just not ready for ‘The Diary of Anne Frank – the Musical’ (performed entirely in mime) but also the realisation that you are not as talented as you thought you were.

Italians were much in evidence this year and if you ever wondered who keeps those shops on the Royal Mile that sell tourist kilts in business, look no further. Lots of butch Italian blokes swanning around wearing what are essentially skirts, while their girlfriends worry that their macho boyfriends might start stealing their frocks when they get home.

There was a certain look among the Italian girlfriends this year. It was a pair of oversized sunglasses perched on a nose that looked as if it had just smelled something bad. It took me a while to work out what that look was. It was a combination of being really pleased that her boyfriend had taken her to the international arts festival (and let’s not forget, Edinburgh is amazing), combined with the fact that the boyfriend had neglected to mention that the arts festival, and indeed Edinburgh, is in Scotland, not the Bahamas. So all her friends are getting no culture and a tan, while she is seeing the greatest arts festival in the world but will be coming home with a cross dresser.

And of course there are the comedians. Festival fact: shouting out ‘Hi there!” in a really confident manner will get Stewart Lee giving back a ‘hi there’ with equal confidence only to be replaced by a look of confusion which can be interpreted as ‘I don’t know you, even off the telly, what the hell?’.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the authentic festival experience

Booking too many shows in one day is the way to guarantee a real Edinburgh Festival experience. Ideally you should leave just enough time to get a drink between each show, but not enough time for a substantive meal. Think how long it takes you to eat a portion of chips swimming in salt ‘n’ sauce and that’s about the right length of time between shows. There’s always a bar at these places, so you can get your drink when you get there. My schedule has worked perfectly. I was sleep deprived, hung over and dashing from show to show. It’s great.

I was also, for the first time in my life, eating a huge cooked breakfast. The hotel offered a continental breakfast or a full Scottish breakfast. The full Scottish breakfast is like the full English breakfast, except it doesn’t pretend for a second it is anything than what it is, an arterial clog on a plate (literally, in the case of the black pudding). Mine consisted of hash browns (surely one of the greatest advances in potato technology since the chip, it’s the chip you can eat at breakfast!), scrambled egg, bacon, mushrooms, black pudding and, and here’s the Scottish part, haggis! That’s right, haggis for breakfast. After this I was ready to either invade England, stalk a stag across the glen for days or go for a bit of a lie down and a sweat.


Because we were in a hotel, we had to put up with other people in our bar. It’s quite fun seeing all the other tourists and, of course, it’s always fun being in a bar. One afternoon we were sitting there scribbling postcards and getting outside a bottle of lunchtime red when there was the swirl of a piper outside and into the hotel came a groom in his kilt and his young bride. The rest of the wedding party followed, all looking very dashing. Careful examination of tats and ear-rings revealed the clan to be MacChav. The guys still looked great, but couldn’t understand why people were giving them high fives as they walked down the street: it’s because there are half a dozen of you in kilts following a piper and a bride and everyone is being nice to you because you’ve made their day a bit more picturesque – of course they are high fiving you, enjoy it!

I wasn’t sporting a hired tartan, I was sporting the family tartan, kilt, day sporran and day jacket. It was a look that stopped short of making me look like I had just stepped off of the front of a shortbread tin but went unnoticed in Edinburgh (except for a young lady visiting from Virginia who had her photograph taken with me, well, when you’re five years old and from Virginia, you probably think a man in a skirt is the most awesome thing you’ve ever seen). But I did feel quite the fellow, striding about the place in my kilt.

Until I pitched up at Magnum, a wee bar on Albany Street and rather a pleasant place for a pint. Already there were another wedding party who had stopped off for a refreshed. No hired stuff here either, but everyone in their jackets, ancient brogues and grandfather’s kilts. When I pitched up you could feel the dynamics of the room change as everyone eyed up one another’s tartan and worked out if they needed to hit anyone in the room to settle a sheep stealing dispute going back twelve generations. Or worse, buy somebody a drink.

The bar was busy, but tremendously convivial. We tucked into our haddock tempura and dripping coated potatoes (fish and chips) while at the next two tables, an interesting scene developed. At a small table sat a man and a woman, dating and in their late twenties. At the next table sat a family, grandparents, young girl and father (actually, as I found out later, uncle). The woman spent about half an hour talking with the little girl and her family, but wasn’t ignoring the boyfriend, instead she was involving him.

Mate, that you stayed shows you are a gentleman and were obviously up for going home and having lots of unprotected sex with that young woman. Not only did he put up with his date fixating on a child, he actually bought a round of whiskies for the gents in the family, who reciprocated by buying the couple a bottle of wine.

This was the perfect storm of Scottish hospitality and generosity meeting Southern manners. The whole thing was tremendously charming and concluded with the uncle asking if his niece could have her picture taken with me and saying ‘she’s being shy, while the young lady in question threw her arms around my wife and gave her a huge embrace. If that’s shy then God alone knows what extrovert is down South.

So still sporting my kilt and my confidence returning, I wandered up to the tattoo, where I felt totally underdressed. The pipers of the massed bands not only have kilts and tartan sashes, but sporrans the size and thickness of a sheep. I strongly suspect they are in fact the beards of their slain enemies and if you look closely you can see a nose at the top of the sporran.

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Caledonian Express

The Caledonian Express is that rarest of railway birds; the sleeper. And an intentional one at that, having bunks and berths, stewards and a lounge car, instead of just knackered commuters dozing.

Sleeper trains essentially take the concept of the romance of rail and raise it to the power of crime and sex. Think sleeper train and you think Orient Express; where essentially posh people commit murder by perforating a chap while he sleeps. Knife crime is, as we know, a major issue in our inner cities and among the young, who would have thought it would also be such a problem among rich international travellers. And that’s just on a train. God alone knows what the murder rate is like on a cruise (for answer see ‘Death on the Nile’). And of course sex – the infamous ‘60mph club’, as made famous in ‘Don’t look now’ and ‘Belly of an archetect.


The reality is somewhat different. Trying to sleep on the Caledonian Express is not unlike trying to sleep in a tumble drier. Trains clank, and sway, and rumble and go over-the-points, over-the-points, over-the-points. They speed up and slow down and they are passed by other trains in the dead of night with a sort of swooshing roaring noise that has you reaching for your own genitals because hey, you’ve got to hang onto something in the event of a crash and that’s a good a thing as any.

But who cares about any of that, because charm triumphs over all. For any little boy who dreamed of being an astronaut, the Caledonian Express is as close as you are going to get to a space ship, or a submarine. The little cabin is perfect in every way, you even get a luxury toiletries kit. (Luxury being a relative term here. You may regard toothpaste and shaving as essential rather than luxury. Maybe it’s just there to impress the French). They should use these to offset complaints about prison overcrowding, give people a tiny cell but with a luxury toiletries kit and they’ll think they’re on holiday rather than starting a ten stretch for G.B.H.

I’ve always loved little toiletry kits. They are second only to those dining kits you get on aeroplanes, plastic cutlery and individual servings of condiments. I used to think that these were the height of sophistication because they came from airline meals. Of course the really sophisticated airline meals came with silver knives and forks and home-wrecker trolly dollies. Now, of course, you’re lucky to get a spork and if the security people had their way we’d be trying to eat soup with our fingers.

And who cares how small the cabin is when the countryside is rolling past in so stately a manner. Or, at least, I presume it to be. Even with the blind up the thing about a sleeper train is that it travels at night. I had a romantic notion that I would travel with the blind up and, looking out of the window, see the English countryside slip past, illuminated by moonlight with the occasional soft pinprick of light showing a distant farmhouse or crofter’s hut. Not quite. What trains do is travel, very quickly, through stations which at night are lit by sodium orange lights, the exact colour of sweets that they don’t make any more because of concerns about sugar and e numbers. This means that you have a fluorescent flashing light illuminating your cabin every few minutes and while that’s great if you’re off your tits on ketimin at some rave in Dorset, it’s no aid to restful sleep. Of course, having the blind up also opens you up to the very real risk – and this happened – of waking up the next morning to find yourself parked up in a station with a bloke in a high-vis jacket outside trying to pretend he’s not just seen you naked.

Where reality met fantasy was the lounge car. This was an eccentric mix of foreigners who did look like they had murder in mind if you pinched the last seat.

So while sleep may have eluded me as surely as it eluded MacBeth, the compactness of the cabin did impress. It was small the same way in which a cottage is small. It’s small because it’s just so, right and proper. It’s a cabin on a train and if one were to extend it, then interesting things would happen the first time the conservatory attachment went through a tunnel. The compact cabin means that everything is in reach while you’re lying in bed – genius! More, you get your breakfast and a paper delivered to you by your steward.


The compactness extends to the narrow-gauge corridor running the length of the sleeper carriages. To maximise cabin space the corridor is the width of a telephone box. Ironic that a train that serves a country with a love of fried food should have ‘you must be this thin to ride this train’ attitude. It’s OK for anorexics, corset enthusiasts and those that don’t have a problem wioth salad but what about Americans, Germans and fried-food fans? My bag was just about slim enough to squeeze down the corridor but getting it and me in to the cabin at the same time was something of a logistical feat. All those years of playing tetris finally paid off.

And you end up pitching up in Edinburgh in the early morning, a few minutes after the last reveller has gone to bed and the pavements are still wet with dew and the mixture and the weak solution of bleach they use to remove the signs of over indulgence. Make the most of it because this is the only time you will see the pavements empty of crowds and people trying to give you leaflets about their show.

Writing and drinking

Laurie Lee wrote that he wrote ‘on wine’, that is, in order to get the creative juices flowing he would get the grape juice flowing first and, somewhere between the sobriety and being drunk enough to think a tattoo is a good idea, he’d churn out literature.

Being a pissed author is nothing new, Hemmingway drank, as did Amis. Of course, there are many more people who are not writers who drink, and plenty of writers who are successful and don’t drink. Something tells me that part of Dan Brown’s recipe for success is not working his way through a crate of special brew, although that’s how many of his readers would be better spending their time.

Journalists are famously boozy and I think that the best job combining getting paid for writing must be resturant critic. The problem is, of course, that you can’t actually get hammered while doing it. This is because you will come to the next morning well fed, but with a clanging hangover, no memory of what the food was actually like and three pages of indecipherable scrawl that you thought at the time was pithy witty notes on the state of the soup.

I’m drinking while I’m writing this, a glass of red. It’s rather nice but I know that I lack the vocabulary and talent required to describe it.

This is a feature shared by wine writers funnily enough, that’s why they make up things like ‘hints of grass’. What in the name of greek buggery is a hint of grass? Either that or the wine has ‘chocolate notes’. They have invented a whole new form of describing things by associating terms that have nothing to do with the product, it’s like describing fence panels using terms normally employed to talk about fish.

Why can’t there be honesty in the profession. ‘This wine tasted okay for a fiver and is ideal for consumption when slumped in front of the telly trying to work out whether or not you’ve seen this episode of Morse.’

If I were a wine writer, instead of a review I’d write a short story that, I hope, would express how first a glass, then a bottle of the stuff being considered made me feel.

Many of my stories would be set in a circus, wintering somewhere rural. The petty jealousies and bickering among the acrobats and the sad lives of the clowns would feature strongly. How refreshing it would be to review a wine and conclude that overall the effect was to leave you feeling just as Bobo the Clown did, as he watched Clarissa the trapeze girl walk off, laughing arm in arm with Carlo the lion tamer. She would never know it had been Bobo, not Carlo, that had sent the flowers. Bobo gave a plaintive honk on his red nose and wandered back to the caravan he shared with three other clowns. He thought he would seek oblivion in drink and this red wine is just the tipple for a broken hearted clown. And a bargain at a fiver a litre.