For my summer holidays, I am going 45 miles east. Delightful as I am sure Sicily, Croatia and Provence are, in August it’s Edinburgh that has my heart.
I lived in our nation’s capital for 20 years, making me one of those rare Glaswegians who feels at home in both cities. Some people might describe me, unkindly, as bipolar.
Today I prefer the American term bi-coastal, more commonly used to describe executive types who zip casually from NY to LA. In my case, it’s more of a weary Scotrail schlep.
I’m in and out of Edinburgh all year but, during August, there is nowhere else I want to be.
This was learned the hard way. In 2001, I moved back west to the city I’d left 20 years before. It was an unusually hot summer and I was finding my way around the old place again, this time as an adult with a four-year-old in tow.
We were in a small park one Saturday afternoon. It was dusty and surprisingly quiet, given the heat. I was chatting listlessly to a neighbour with a kid around the same age. She inquired if I was missing Edinburgh.
Suddenly in my head I was in George Street at midnight, trying to get a mobile phone signal, wondering if I should hazard Late ‘n’ Live or just retire to Assembly’s rackety club bar.
Yes, I admitted, I was. Especially because it was August.
She looked surprised that this should make any difference.
You know, I prompted. The festival? The fringe? The biggest single arts event in the world? Sodom, Gomorrah and lots of desperate thesps dressed as lampshades?
She did not know. Or had a vague notion something was happening an hour’s train ride away. But she was quite happy to sit on a bench and watch her child on a roundabout while I was pawing the earth with exasperation at missing it all.
It had not occurred to me how important the Edinburgh festival had become until, suddenly, it wasn’t there. I thought I would miss my friends and the view of the Forth from the brow of Hanover Street and living so close to the beach. And I did, but I also found the empty August diary devastating.
Turns out that I need to spend a month having culture injected into my veins. It tops me up for the rest of the year. Without an annual binge of cerebral book events, questionable comedy, at least one ill-advised drag show in a basement, an unexpected night of earnest debate with a Latvian playwright and some heart-stopping contemporary dance, my whole year is out of whack.
I got through 2001, somehow, but promised myself that I would not make that mistake again.
Two decades earlier, when I started at Edinburgh University, I had never heard of the festival or its fringe. Then, in the summer of1982, when I was casting about for ways to fund my 1950s dress habit during the long summer holidays, someone mentioned the Assembly Rooms.
Bill Burdett-Coutts had started using this chandelier-draped hunk of George Street real estate as a venue the year before, paving the way for the fringe of comedy, spectacle and debauchery that we enjoy today.
I know this now. At the time all I had to go on was that they were pretty near our flat, apparently full of bars and shows during August and in need of staff. I had never pulled a pint, didn’t really know what a show was and already been fired by a baked potato shop for wearing too much makeup.
Why would any of that put me off? With the confidence of Liz Truss cutting top rate income tax, I pitched up and suggested they give me a job.
Amazingly, they did. I met Ivor Cutler, who was performing there that year. Saw a lot of shifty punters attending a controversial Japanese acrobatic performance with male nudity. Someone from Hull Truck Theatre Company was very rude about a pint I poured. With good reason.
I was befriended by several dreadful old soaks sorry veteran actors who tried to borrow money. All while living on tomato juice and peanuts, the most nutritious items available from the bar.
Would that I could recall any of the actual shows I saw. My memory, capricious and unreliable at the best of times, refuses to come up with any images of Cutler on stage or Asian men in the scud.
That whole decade of Augusts is a bit of a blur. Julian Clary, then accompanied by Fanny the Wonderdog, was an astounding and camp antidote to the Aids epidemic. Victor, Barry and Bing Hitler gave me rare pangs of homesickness.
I can still sing “Oh, the Grosvenor is a big hotel in Byres Road” to the tune of Oklahoma! There might have been a silent tear when the comedian I now know is called Craig Ferguson, his face scrunched as a used tissue, told a joke about the 61 bus to Maryhill.
Back then it did not occur to me that I could go to the official festival. It seemed as viable as visiting the clouds. But when the Michael Clark ballet I am Curious, Orange, featuring the music of the Fall, appeared in the 1988 programme, it transpired that I could buy a ticket just like anyone else.
What a thing to see. I sat in the stalls of the King’s Theatre beside a guy from Falkirk in a snorkel parka. He recorded the whole thing on a Walkman stashed up his sleeve, while I wondered why the hell I had waited so long to do this.
This year there are around 12 official festival shows in my Jenga-packed calendar. Plus everything that’s on at the Traverse, several sessions getting to grips with the wild programme at Summerhall and even a day dedicated to campy old shit.
It’s what Julian and Fanny would have wanted.
I’m covering all of these for Across The Arts so will have much to delight you with over the next few weeks. I also have Thoughts on how the reviewing landscape has changed, star inflation and why we need proper critics. But these are treats for the future.
Bet you canny wait.
In the meantime, feel free to relive the first day of last year’s fringe with me.
Several lols here from the opening caption on. Also, nailing east/west divide.