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.