As an arts journalist, you know you’re getting old when you scan the Edinburgh Festival programme, and instead of thinking ‘Wow, look at all this,’ your reaction is ‘Oh Christ, look at all that’. You tell friends that you’re off to cover Edinburgh in August, and instead of lighting up with envy, they suck their teeth in sympathy. Ouch – nasty! And yet there it is, nonetheless: that great immovable cultural blow-out on the shores of the Forth; infinite, monstrous, plastered all over press and media, and defying you to ignore it.
Could you design a less suitable host city for a major international arts festival?
No, it’s got to be done, and you know what that means. The hell of a Cross Country train. Accommodation that is simultaneously the worst and the most expensive that you’ve had all year. Nowhere to eat after a late show and nowhere quiet that you can collapse and nurse a pint or a coffee in the long, solitary hours between your appointments with Culture. And above all, exhaustion. Within 24 hours of stumbling off the Voyager at Haymarket Station your legs will be like lead, the soles will be flapping from your shoes and you will be absolutely, comprehensively, kill-me-now knackered.
Honestly, could you design a less suitable host city for a major international arts festival? Sod’s law dictates that if your first show is in the New Town, the next will start 30 minutes afterwards on the far side of the Royal Mile. Taxis will blow the budget; the tram goes nowhere near. No, you’ve got to speed-walk uphill in the thunderous August fug, trying, as you go, to negotiate a street plan that could have been designed by M.C. Escher.
It’s fiendish. One wrong turning – one swerve to avoid a green-haired acrobat, or the gaggle of Japanese schoolkids pointing tearily at the burnt-out shell of the Harry Potter café – and you’re suddenly on entirely the wrong level of the city, staring at 300 stone steps to get you back on course. You wipe away the sweat and glance at your watch. Four minutes to curtain-up, wherever that is. I suppose it’s good for the step-count, which is just as well, since fast food is basically all that this city has to offer after the late shows finish.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not griping about the artistic content of the Festival or the Fringe, even if an evil little voice inside me keeps insisting that 2021 – post-Covid, when the Fringe was barely functioning – was the most pleasant Edinburgh August in years. In my vanished early-noughties youth, I too embraced the madness. We’d come up in a gang, surviving on beer and deep-fried white pudding, and crashing at 3 a.m. in a student flophouse. We wanted the whole shebang, the Fringier the better. Stewart Lee when he was still playing in sweaty cellars. Drama students in sacks pretending to be caterpillars. The Cremaster Cycle at the film festival, and on one particularly rewarding night, a US sideshow geek who ate live crickets for cash. That, it has to be said, was entertainment.
Even then, though, we’d need a holiday to recover and our bank accounts lay in ashes. One day, we promised ourselves, we’d come back and do it all in real style. Well, that day is now, and the Edinburgh Festival is still shattering and it still leaves you skint. You’d better have booked your accommodation at least eight months in advance, or you’ll be paying Mandarin Oriental prices for a bunk bed and a shared bathroom. A reasonably flush overseas friend brought his wife and Harry Potter-mad daughter for a romantic tour of Bonnie Scotland, forgetting – fatally – that it was August. They ended up sleeping in a converted shipping container next to the Airport.
My advice is to stay in central Glasgow instead: it’s quieter, cheaper, and only 50 minutes from Waverley Station. The late train glides out, a deep calm descends, and you can watch the gentleman opposite you downing his entire six-pack of Tennent’s with equanimity. Soon, soon you will sleep. Again, don’t misunderstand me. Off-season Edinburgh is glorious. I don’t think there’s a city in these islands that can make such poetry out of a November weekend. The elegant hand-lettering on the taxis, the golden swirl of the Jobby against a raw blue sky, and the yeasty, toasty brewery smell that fills the air in the early hours of the morning. Breathe it in at leisure, in solitude, and the spirit of Walter Scott floods your soul like sea fret.
But not in August. Never in August except on business, because it certainly isn’t pleasure. The conclusion is brutal: decrepitude awaits us all, and some things are simply more fun – more possible – when you’re young. Felix Mendelssohn lingered in the ruins of Holyrood and imagined the opening of his Third Symphony. I’m slumped on a bench in Princes Street Gardens just praying for the bagpipes to stop. Sorry, Auld Reekie, it isn’t you, it’s me. Edinburgh at Festival time is no country for middle-aged men.
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