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.
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