August in Edinburgh

All the way through August I made mental notes to record highlights of the Edinburgh Festival, but then the fireworks finale shattered my train of thought and all I could think of was the spectacular sky display on the last night of the festival. It was the closest I’ve been to seeing the Northern Lights, which the Scots aptly call ‘The Merry Dancers’, because on this night The Merry Dancers took the form of fireworks moving in time to Dvorak's Slavonic and Brahms' Hungarian dances. The musical compositions were performed live in Princes Street gardens by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and broadcast all the way down Princes Street itself, where hundreds of thousands of us stood with eyes fixed on Edinburgh Castle while the synchronised coloured rockets and sparkling whirls made light confetti of the sky.

Now that those sparks have settled I remember the highlights of the festival month when street performers, from mime artists and monocyclists to puppets on strings, turned the Royal Mile into an open-air theatre daily, despite it being the wettest August since records began. Music happened in funky venues like the 1930s cabaret-style Spiegeltents, where old-timey string band The Wilders played vintage honky-tonk music like in Oh Brother, Where Art Though? I got lucky on a ticket to see Gaelic rock stars Runrig, and my favourite Julie Fowlis, playing at Edinburgh Castle just moments before the show began, and was ushered into the Queen’s Hall for a Salsa Celtica concert by a good-natured member of the band. It was great fun knowing that authors like Ian Rankin, Salmon Rushdie and Alexander McCall Smith were walking about the Book Festival and we heard Margaret Atwood speak on the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize, avoiding arbitrary questions from the audience with replies I chuckle about still. There were poets reading love poems, published novelists reading first chapters of unpublished novels, performances in phone boxes. It was thrilling to see Matthew Bourne’s racy ‘Dorian Gray’ on the opening night of the world premiere, from the highest and cheapest seats in Kings Theatre. But I needed big binoculars for the finer details. There was always music in the streets and always people handing out flyers for yet another performance I wouldn’t get to see. I had great friends visiting on two weekends of the four and from wherever we stood we were never more than five minutes from a show, a street performance, a gallery, a row of alluring shops or probably someone famous. It wasn’t possible to see a thousandth of what the Festival had to offer because too much was happening all at once, but for all of August I did see Edinburgh city Dressing Up and Going to Town.

Goodbye Rankeillor Street

In July I rented a room in a flat in the student centre of Edinburgh. Around the corner was a wine shop that was convenient for some, and two doors further along was a fish shop that was smelly for all. It was close to the Queen’s Hall and the place to go ceilidh dancing, and there was a grand view of the Salisbury Crags, where climbers hung on the long summer evenings. But the kitchen was always a mess and one flat-mate moved out with the telephone. Another was involved in a late-night inebriation scene for which you’ll need a password to read more. We also had a 24-hour panic when a workman in the flat below mistakenly turned off our water supply. But if there hadn’t been a water-cut, I wouldn’t have wandered down to Warrender Baths, a beautifully restored Victorian swimming pool from the 1800s with old-fashioned, arched changing booths, period clocks, and a rounded glass roof that I could see the evening sky through while I swam. When the doors closed at ten o’ clock I walked along to the ringing of bells from a Marchmont church, pausing with wide eyes as a fox dashed across Mansion House Road. It was a fair exchange for no water in the Rankeillor Street flat, and now that I’ve left it I don’t mind its bothers a bit.