G&P Travel Special - Postcard from Edinburgh

There's more to the Edinburgh Festival than 'getting pissed and eating chips'.  Apparently.

Belt failure does not, in this case, result in unexpected tackle in the baggage area but rather long queues at check-in at the airport.  The BA staff scramble man and womanfully to cope, and as a result we are checked in at the First Class check-in desk, opened to cope with the backlog.

'Does this mean we get to fly first class?'

'No.'

Our luggage is now travelling in a better class than we are.

The departure lounge is the haunt of fragrance bandits, who stand ready to spray you with scent should you slow down.  If you are already a melody of malodours, they will spray it onto a little cardboard strip for you to smell at your leisure, or even to keep.  Frequent flyers are known to keep their sock draw smelling of sandalwood for years on end by replenishing their scented strips.

The bookshops of the departure lounge are unashamedly places to obtain holiday reads.  If you want to bulk buy Dan Brown in hardback, then this is the place to come.  My selection was 'World War Z', a novel about a pandemic that originates and spreads from China by, among other means, air transport.  My seat-neighbour on the aeroplane was a well mannered Chinese man and his reluctance to turn off his mobile 'phone meant that he was either not an English speaker or was arming something but was definitely not a zombie.  So that was a relief, eh.

The airport departure lunge remains, in the main, a mall, but with bars where people can start drinking (or 'getting in the holiday mood') at nine in the morning in preparation for drinking on a long flight and then drinking in a different time zone.  As call after final call after last call went out for four passengers to catch their flight to Barcelona NOW, I wondered just what might be more fun than catching your flight.  That said, it was Easyjet, so maybe they're had decided that another lager in the Sky Bar and a taxi ride home in disgrace was a sensible way to go.

The flight itself was brief and pleasant and thee was even time for a cuppa and your choice of biscuit or crisp.  The crisp packets had expanded like balloons in the relatively low pressure of the cabin and looked like those pillows National Express passengers drool into on long journeys.  I imagine that when opened they went up like some sort of snack based IED.  I settled for the biscuit as opening exploding bags and being showered in cheese and onion flakes can be a distressing experience, not least for the poor sod who has to clean up the crisps and nervous reaction afterwards.

On the cobbled, crowded streets of the city, festival visitors mix with people desperate to get you to go to their show and with people who have been in shows and are now on their way to see their mates' shows, or more likely get a drink.  Celebrity spotting is the order of the day but when 'The Shawshank Redemption' emptied out, it was like spotting celebrity fish in a boozy barrel as the actors emptied onto the street and headed straight for the pop up bar on the street right outside the venue.

Of course, 'celebrity' status is debatable and we cannot even begin to assess the damage to teevee careers that the cancellation of 'The Bill' has wrought.

The shows may not turn a profit.  The local printers do.

Rick Wakeman was spotted at The Assembly Rooms.  He has a show there, so it probably was him.  The problem with identifying the real Rick Wakeman is that Rick Wakeman looks a hell of a lot like a hell of a lot of other blokes up here for the Festival, blokes of an age where they think long hair is still a rebellious statement, even though it has been many years since there was ever any danger if them being mistaken for a girl from behind.

Esther Rantzen was in the audience for Marcus Brigstocke’s show (showbiz mates, she guested on his radio show and was, if I recall correctly, rather entertaining).  I hope she liked the joke about Rolf Harris.  It will be interesting to see just how much material the Edinburgh comics can wring out of Yewtree.  Normally of course it’s just puppets that benefit from peadoes.

The Book Festival, neatly corralled in the literature-friendly surroundings of Charlotte Square, is wonderful, with marquees arrayed around the green and a pop up book shop (a shop in a tent selling books, not a shop selling pop p books, although there may have been pop up books in the children’s section).

My god, I thought that young people at the Fringe could drink, they are amateurs compared to the middle classes at a literary festival, hoovering up red wine at ten in the morning.  It would appear that if you’re in a marquee normal rules are suspended and if it comes in a plastic glass, it doesn’t count.

Jonathan Coe was on fine form as the audience (average age = Radio 4 demographic) were confronted with the ugly truth that ‘the News Quiz’ is not satire.  Coe named Stewart Lee as the country’s leading satirist, leading the woman sitting behind me to gasp ‘my God!’ in a scandalised exhalation.  The Book Festival may be sponsored by the Guardian, but the audience know their real parents are Radio 4.

Stewart Lee, arguably the country’s leading satirist, attracted quite a crowd of young people.  Indeed there are many young people in Edinburgh at Festival time, all apparently very keen to hand you a leaflet; and of course they all go to one another’s shows.  Eventually, there will be so many shows that the Festival will consist entirely of drama students doing improv musical comedies, endlessly circulating as the audience for each others shows.

Stewart Lee, arguably the country’s leading satarist, was name-checked by Richard Herring during Herring’s show.  I’ve seen Richard Herring a couple of times at the Festival and he regularly mentions Lee, but Lee never mentions Herring.  It’s getting to be awkward, like when you stay friends with a couple who have separated and one has moved on whilst the other, around about the second glass of wine, asks ‘does he ever mention me?’.  The wrong answer, which is, ironically, the right one, leads to an evening of Lambrini flavoured tears.

The point is reached in the Pleasance Courtyard when you stop celebrity spotting and simply accept that the world you inhabit includes celebrities released into the general population, although it’s got to mean something if there are more celebrities in the audience than there are on stage.  Andrew (shagger) Marr was in the audience for a satire about the BBC news department.  So, no pressure to make it accurate, funny and successful then.  Still recovering from his stroke he looked frail as he leaned on his walking stick in the queue.  That’s the Festival for you, they don’t even fast-track you if you’re a celeb.

Certainly, it’s been the best food of the festival this year, mainly because a little bit of research and planning has resulted in at least one hot meal a day not eaten out of a polystyrene container with a plastic fork whilst standing up.

A ‘Scottish fruit bowl’

The hotel were kind enough to set out a ‘Scottish fruit bowl’ upon arrival – a selection of Tunnock’s delicacies, artfully arranged on a slate and dusted with what looked and tasted like icing sugar.  It looked almost too pretty to eat, almost.

Scottish healthy option – note salad leaf

Showing unprecedented levels of foresight, two restaurant bookings were made this year, instead of the usual tactic of turning up at the Magnum bar and promising to do three courses in 45 minutes.  The first was a fish restaurant off the Grassmarket where, it being Festival time, every table was taken despite booking two weeks in advance and we had to sit up at the bar.  What hardship! 

It was great, dining perched atop a barstool is always a treat, particularly at the horseshoe shaped bar giving great views of other diners, and of course I have the balancing skills of a jolly jack-tar aloft in a nor-easter.  The other reservation was made, on foot, on a smartphone, walking to the restaurant in question. 

The wonders of technology, I got the booking confirmation about the same time as I was opening the door of the restaurant.  The wonders of technology.

Top show – Rich Hall, without a doubt, the perfect mixture of raw seething anger, crowd interaction and comedy all wrapped up in a voice that comes all the way from the Old Testament via the heart of Texas.