Three days into August and Edinburgh explodes. The streets swell with people and every square inch of spare shop front and telephone box becomes covered with posters and flyers. Previously quiet public spaces are filled with inflatable venues, mobile stages and temporary bars. If you were bedridden for a week in early August it would be like an inverted version of the beginning of 28 Days Later.

I'm trying to be cynical about the festival, I really am. The received wisdom of embittered locals and arts critics alike is that the festival is more curse than blessing. Yes, the accommodation is expensive. Yes, people with a straight face will charge you £3.20 for a pint of Tennants. Yes, the weather is intermittent and hordes of insecure drama students will thrust endless shiny flyers into your hand, but dammit, there is just something amazing about sitting with a pint in the Udderbelly Pasture, or the Spiegeltent, knowing you are at the centre of the cultural universe. It one of the rare occasions in which the term 'festival vibe' can be used without making you sound like a total cretin.

The part that no-one really prepares you for is the sheer size of the whole affair. The fringe itself is breathtakingly huge, but this is just one half of the main festival line-up. The fringe is Luke Skywalker to the original festival's Obi Wan Kenobi, the alcopop to the champagne of high culture that is going on in the bigger venues. Add to this the world-class Jazz, Television and and Film festivals, a famous book festival, an Art festival and the enormous crowds drawn by the Edinburgh Tattoo, and you have four weeks of mayhem in which people of all persuasions should be able to find something to suit their tastes. All the festival's strengths and flaws derive from this incredible breadth. If you are here for just the headline acts then you are missing the point. You could book yourself into a nice hotel in London, buy an underground ticket and a Timeout, and probably see as many big names across London on any given weekend with enough planning and a credit card. Edinburgh is really as much about the risk of seeing the shit as it is about seeing the quality, if only because the juxtaposition pushes the highs even higher, and any disappointment is cushioned by the knowledge that something amazing is always going on nearby, somewhere. The hunting, sleuthing and planning can provide as much pleasure as the show itself, and the ease and frequency of everything means you take risks on shows you might never normally see. Edinburgh is indeed a clusterfuck, a entertainment industry trade show that slowly chews and digests a normally placid city. It is loud, beautiful and crazy. A few days of it will leave you punch drunk with giddy happiness, as one fantastic show merges seamlessly into another.

In just one short week so far I've met some of my comedy heroes, seen Japanese silent comedians perform puerile magic tricks, been accused of wanting to be a bear, witnessed an Argentinian man run through walls, been part of a psychic magic trick, confessed my Englishness in a room full of drunken Scots, watched a Dutch man eat a Mars bar with a sock puppet, and even seen an invisible man naked.

Cynicism? I've forgotten what the word means.

Edinburgh Festival, Te amo.

Indulging my late night supermarket habit I drive to the 24hr ASDA on a Friday night. The shop is as pallid and ghastly as I had hoped, with the usual crowds of human wreckage that make my people-watching so pleasurable. I fill the trolley and squeeze into checkout, brain on autopilot. The cashier looks up at me and we both have a flash of recognition. He's a scruffy-looking lad, in his late twenties. He clearly knows who I am.
Shit. Where have I met him before? Must surely be a student, who else do I know who would be working the graveyard shift at ASDA? He smiles at me with huge embarrassment.
“This is my other job” he explains apologetically.
Job? So perhaps he's not a student, a student wouldn't be that embarrassed. He continues to scan in silence, avoiding my gaze. I need to say something, even just to acknowledge that I know him from somewhere. His face does look so damn familiar, like someone I've met just recently. I'm dressed in my usual scruffy attire for a late night supermarket run, baggy tracksuit trousers, tattered swimming teaching t-shirt. I'm the one who should be embarrassed.
“Do you get off soon?” I ask in desperation.
“In a couple of hours” he replies “3 o'clock”
We return to awkward silence, I concentrate fiercely upon my packing, him on scanning the items. We manage to negotiate the Chip and Pin machine without having to resort to eye contact. As he hands me back the card it suddenly comes back to me. I know who this man is, I can remember where I met him. I saw this man this very morning. I sat down with him at the university. I had a careers interview with him...
... No wonder he looked so fucking embarrassed to be found working the night shift at ASDA. I push my trolley off giggling.
“Fuck..” I wonder, “should I take his careers advice, or just try to do the complete opposite?”

You don't have to be a lefty to be utterly outraged by these total fuckers. Awesome, terrible, head-shakingly sad.

I'm spending a lazy afternoon watching Live Earth. There is a curiously neutral tone to the normally cheerleading coverage. The presenters are talking about the recent survey whereby a narrow majority of people felt that the science on global warming was overhyped. This is quite an interesting statistic, not least because implies that the average person on the street believes that they know the science better than the scientists, or at least can make a valid judgement on it based exclusively on media coverage. The idea of a concert to promote awareness of Global Warming is a bit of an empty gesture as far as I'm concerned. I'm no climatologist but I've made the effort to at least read the coffee table science books on the subject. The consensus is strong, the message is blunt - we change now and we change quick, or else we're fucked. But unfortunately global warming is a unique and powerful threat that doesn't fit into our normal understanding of how a democratic nation state should meet a challenge. Live Earth seems like another example of deck chairs being rearranged on the deck of the Titanic. It's the big media pacifier we all crave to avoid the starkness of the facts and the scale of the challenge.

I liked An Inconvenient Truth, if only because it was founded on real, checkable data, and it managed to slip in plenty of solid non-polemical stuff amongst all the Gore hero worship. The flawed idea behind Live Earth is that somehow if the yoof are unable to listen to the stark, empirically-based arguments of the scientific community, they will listen to the lead singer of Razorlight, when he raises his fist and shouts a vapid environmental slogan to get a cheap cheer from the audience. What we see in Live Earth is the translation of an idea from fact to ideology. In the process the idea loses its sense of reality and therefore loses its soul. It becomes a cause, another vapid belief cut loose from reality to float in the ether until it is channelled by idealistic teens into Myspace profiles and slogan t-shirts. Those who stand to profit from Climate Change know this, and use the very same tone to counteract it. Ideology versus ideology, not versus fact. Check out this truly remarkable advert from Exxon.



The reason people try to fight with ideology and not fact is because there is a belief that if we change people's beliefs we will automatically change their behaviour. This is a sad lie, particularly as modern culture encourages us to break of from the reality of ourselves and wear ideas and ideologies like fashionable clothing. As I watched the concert unfold I thought about how fervently I believed in action on climate change, how I have read several books on it to affirm my faith, how I have tried so hard to change my carbon footprint, and of course, how I have still taken three climate destroying flights this year already. The changing beliefs = changing minds idea presumes that humans are rational, logical creatures. It doesn't take someone with more than a school playground-level understanding of human nature to realise that humans don't often work like that. It is entirely possible to change behaviour without changing beliefs, take the introduction of seatbelt legislation in the US. It was widely rejected and derided at first, most saw it as an insult to American notions of freedom and liberty. Eventually it became normal, through steady regular enforcement of a law. This is how new truths are born, not through idealistic one-off rock concerts, but through the gradual acclimatisation to a truth through repeated exposure to the facts and to its impact upon our lives.
Sadly this is where we hit the brick wall. We are out of time on climate change. It's happening, we must respond immediately or accept its consequences. We are a long way from stabilising carbon production, let alone reducing it. Waters would continue to rise even if we were to stop all carbon production right now, simply because the effects of the last half decade will take time to come into effect. Curiously this is the sort of situation which would seem to demand autocratic rule. Given the impossibility of the cliched benevolent dictator, the best we can hope for is some sort of Churchillian strongman, a true leader who recognizes the threat and has the charisma to lead us out of this crisis. However, we face several challenges to this possibility, not least the lack of an obvious candidate (I'm not convinced by Gore's sudden charisma, he's got a social boob job, fine for television but obvious up close).
The trouble is that this is not wartime. Leaders like Churchill could mobilize society because there was an obvious tangible enemy who we could envision causing us each individual harm. But we are not dealing with a situation motivated by personal fear, but a more general social kind of fear. No-one is afraid that Global Warming is going to kill us, certainly not in the West anyway. More cynical minds just look at the maps of flooded cities and think about buying property in the highlands. Activists try their best to make it into something scary and personally threatening, but whereas after 9/11 the threat of terrorism was enough to crush the sales of airline tickets, the vague fear of some waterlogged future has clearly failed to stop people booking cheap weekend vacations on the continent. It is also hard for a leader to channel that other traditional method of social control, patriotism against an international problem, particularly when the enemy is effectively ourselves. There is only so much environmental hand wringing a society can take before a significant portion of the population gets back in their SUVs.
Live Earth will fail more today people are apathetic towards grand ideas and ideologies, because they no longer listen with both their hearts and their heads, because this is just one cause of many that they will be exposed to this week.
Next week the world will still get a little bit warmer, I will get a little bit more cynical and already Live Earth will be being forgotten.

I'm no fan of Christopher Hitchens, not least for his hawkish position on the Iraq War, but his new book, God is Not Great does make an excellent Atheist point:

Did Moses really need the Ten Commandments to know that theft and murder were not okay?

Let that one roll around your brain for a while..

I went to club called Snatch for a friends birthday and was the unwitting recipient of a Cuban Brothers live show. It was one of the coolest, funniest things I have seen for a long time. Can't really explain it save for to say that it was three plump middle aged men, dressed as comedy cubans, break dancing, rapping and singing fantastically. I can't recoomend them highly enough. Below is a videa that might go some way to explaining the experience:


The Cuban Brothers

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I walk through the centre of Edinburgh in the sunshine, heading for the famous North Bridge. As I get to the crossroads at the mouth of the bridge my path is blocked by police tape, and a policeman gestures frantically for me to take another route. After searching around for a while I finally manage to find an alternative way to cross the ditch that runs through the heart of Edinburgh, taking me down beneath the bridge and round to the other side. As I cross beneath the bridge I'm suddenly aware of lots of police around me and hundreds of public gazing upwards. I turn and look up to see a man, edging round the outside of one of the bridge columns and trying to work himself up to jump.
My first thoughts are to stop and watch the drama unfold. It's been a boring day so far and I have a sudden urge to join in the spectacle. I try to figure out why he has chosen North Bridge to make his suicide attempt. North Bridge is not very high, probably not high enough to be fatal by itself, and it spans the railway station and a couple of roads.
It certain to be a messy death if it proves successful.
In the end I stop by the entrance of the station, where already a sizeable crowd has gathered, the majority pointing camera phones towards him with outstretched arms. The whole scene feels like a more twisted version of the Thames whale. Office workers have taken extended cigarette breaks to come outside and point and stare at the spectacle. The woman next to me has gone to great lengths to go and get her professional-looking camera with an enormous telephoto lens on it. A small line of students to the left of me swap black jokes and a young man lovingly embraces his girlfriend from behind as she stares upwards. For a split second I feel like I'm at a concert, and then I glance up at the frantically pacing man on the ledge and the illusion is broken.
The drunk guy beside me nudges me,
“Ah only get ahn hoor and a haf visiting tyme wi'me bairns” he informs me drunkenly “ahn this cunt has taken haf o'it already”.
He brings the can of Special Brew to his lips thoughtfully.
“Ah'd have pushed the cunt off ahlreedy”
There isn't much I can say to this that won't make me look like a heartless bastard or get me punched so I just smile awkwardly. He shuffles off swearing and I sigh gratefully.

I still feel an urge to stay and see what happens, but before I start jostling for a better spot I take a look around me and realise that I need to force myself to go home, for the good of my soul. The sense of expectation is growing stronger, with an odd sense of hunger in the crowd for this to end the way they have been secretly hoping for since they came out to watch. The man seems to be calming down a bit and is smoking cigarettes that the police have brought for him. The crowd start to mumble amongst themselves in a mixture of excitement and discontent. I can't help thinking of the old British tradition of the public execution, and smile at the irony of the fact that I'm next to the entrance of the Edinburgh Dungeon, a tourist attraction entirely reliant upon that grizzly legacy.
At that point I force my legs to take me away from this scene. I have no positive desire in me to see a man die, only negative ones that I probably shouldn't surrender to. On the way home the headlines on the newspaper boards are all about the latest scandal from Big Brother.
“Small wonder”, I think, as I look back at the swelling crowds, heads craned upwards towards the scared-looking man on the bridge.




Postscript: Things turned out okay in the end.

as predicted....

"She (Paris Hilton) added that she hoped her time in prison would inspire other young people to think about their actions and make good decisions. "These last couple of weeks have been a lot of time for self-reflection on my life and realising what's important," she added."
-The Guardian, 4/6/07

I feel sick.