Waking up with a heartbeat in your head is never particularly pleasant, but in Edinburgh – a city of untold excess during August – you can satisfy any hangover with another beer as soon as you’re on your feet. It’s the done thing. I had a breakfast pint in the bar of my hostel and noticed a sign on the door that said ‘You can phone from here.’ Indeed there was a payphone, but it seems like a rather old fashioned boast in these days of instant and mobile communications. “Have you heard, dear? St Christopher’s Youth Hostel has one these new ‘phone’ devises. Perhaps we might take a stroll down there later and investigate?�
There was also a sign on the door advertising wireless internet connection. I think that rather trumps a payphone and is certainly more in keeping with the times. Yet the ‘you can phone from here’ sign is more prevalent and certainly the one of which they are most proud. Perhaps there’s a logic behind it in that youth hostels naturally get a lot of visitors from abroad, some of whom won’t have functioning mobile phones, or perhaps come from a country where telephone communication is still a rarity. Borneo perhaps. But it was one of those old payphones that you wouldn’t really trust with an international call, the ones where three out of every four coins you drop into it don’t work and fall through, and besides, calling China for example would be so expensive that the sign should really read ‘You can phone from here for the same cost as buying a new mobile phone. So do that.’
I’d not seen a single show as yet but that will change and besides, you can really appreciate the Edinburgh Festival by simply walking around. Everything’s a riot of shameless promotion, people handing out fliers, posters plastered on top of a wedge of other posters, all jostling for dominance. Then there’s all the free street entertainment, which is all very good but not really my cup of tea. Then there’s the bars where you can pretty much see most of the people in shows for free, drowning their sorrows at a bad review or making themselves seen to show off about a good one.
I’d taken a long stroll and eventually decided upon some dinner at The Mussel Inn on Rose Street. This famous restaurant only serves sea food, predominantly big metal pots of mussels in delicious sauces. It’s very popular and the only available seat for me was sharing a table with anther solo diner, an old Chinese man. We got to chatting. His name was Fook Ping Lau – and yes, I smiled at that too. Ha-Ha! Foreign names! Foreign names that sound a bit rude! Ha! It turns out he’s a retired business man who now just travels the world, having a laugh. He’s got a wife but he packs her off on a cruise ship and then flies all over the place alone, having adventures. It’s amazing who you meet in Edinburgh, and eventually we even swapped numbers. He told me to call him if I am ever in Hong Kong, which is unlikely, and I said he could call me if he’s ever in Liverpool, which is far more likely. I wonder if he’ll call? It would be odd… “Who was that?�
“On the phone? Oh that was Fook Ping Lau. He’s in town and we’re going for a meal.�
“Who on Earth is Fook Ping Lau?�
“A seventy one year old Chinese bloke from Hong Kong I met in Edinburgh over a bowl of mussels. See you later. Are you laughing at his name? Oh do grow up.�
I saw my first show an hour or so later, Robin Ince at The Assembly Rooms. It was a rather ramshackle, knockabout hour but purposefully so. He said “Some people at this festival have very polished shows, with a theme and everything. I’ve not. I’m just going to tell some stories, read some bits out of a book or the newspaper, and then you can go home and play a game whereby you try and make a show out of it.� Fine by me.
He also said how the show was originally intended to be observational comedy, but he found that half the stuff he does in his life people don’t relate to, and indeed it’s just him and him alone that do these things, and so therefore it’s just an exposure of mental illness. He gave a list of ‘Do you ever find yourself…?’ questions and the audience had to raise their hands if they could relate to them. “Do you ever find yourself walking around your flat pretending to be Morrissey?� I, of course, but my hand up but then so, to my amazement, did a great many other people. I am not alone! It’s normal! It’s perfectly normal! I feel a great weight has been lifted.
Later in the evening I wandered into the Balmoral for a martini. This is perhaps the best hotel in Edinburgh, the polar opposite of my hostel. I sat at the bar and got chatting to a guy called Bill, who’s in his sixties and now runs a charity called the Autism Treatment Trust. The basic and radical message of this charity is that autism is treatable, and is in fact not chemical but environmental. In other words, people are born perfectly normal but develop autism, which is not the perceived medical opinion. Cases have rocketed in recent years, and Bill puts this down to vaccinations given to young children that contain mercury. It was interesting stuff, but I have the habit sometimes of coming over as a journalist and he began to suspect I was a spy, sent by one of the organisations that opposes him. Seriously. He thought I was probing for information. It’s just the way I ask questions. Anyway, I regained his trust and now, rather bizarrely, I’m to visit his office tomorrow morning at eleven.
“What do you mean, why have you got to do that?�
I don’t know. I’d had a drink. Your guess is as good as mine. It seems in Edinburgh, even events away from the festival itself can take strange twists.
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