A Lament for the 2020 Edinburgh Festival

Every year, for the god knows how many years now, we take a house, for the whole of August, in Edinburgh, for the Festivals. In recent years it has been a gorgeous eighteenth-century property on the ancient and cobbled George Square, complete with chandeliers and a vaulted basement dining room and loads of bedrooms for family and visitors.

It is the time for friends and a stream of visitors come and go throughout the festival. Old comrades from the Junior leaders regiment in the Army, guys I worked with in the Union, lawyers, philosophers, priests, poets comedians, artists, actors, professors of this and professors of that, taxi drivers and once, a circus ringmaster from Berlin wearing a white top hat a red frock coat with riding breeches.

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It is Edinburgh that is the attraction. The great concerts, operas and ballets of the International Festival; the drama, comedy,  music and spoken words of the Fringe festival; the books and poets and authors and readings and workshops of the Book Festival; the galleries of the Art Festival and the massed pipes and drums and military marching  bands from all over the world of the legendary Edinburgh Tattoo. And as if that were not enough the buzz of the city’s ancient streets, filled with acrobats and street performers, tightrope walkers, magicians, fire eaters and bagpipe players, pop groups, rock groups, classical quartets, spoon players, those wild bare chested  highland drummers in their rough brown kilts bringing the ferocity of the clans to Princess street,

and  chancers and people pretending to be statutes, with beer gardens and street markets selling rings for your fingers, rings for your toes, rings for your nose and god knows where else, and leather bracelets and paintings and sculptures and kilts and scarves and bonnets and pots and precious stones and polished stones and ethnic foods from every corner of the earth.
And the restaurants are full, and the pubs are overflowing. We dine like kings in the basement dining room, usually by candlelight often with songs and poems and readings. Or we frequent posh restaurants,  mutton and mussel suet pudding at the First Coast, Oysters at the Café royal, a pint by the coast in Lieth with a visit to the Royal Yacht Britannia to see the bed where Charles dallied with Diana as they sailed across the Mediterranean sea, *  or perhaps just bringing  home a currywurst and chips from one of the street trucks parked around George Square.

And this year, it is cancelled.  All of it, cancelled. Not a flyer to be seen.

The loss is beyond measure, not just for us and our month of culture but for thousands of actors, hundreds of drama groups and theatre companies,  legions of comedians, battalions of musicians, dozens of choirs, dancers galore, small regiments of street performers, a thousand restaurants and all their chefs and waiters.  Hundreds of empty hotels, countless empty rented rooms.  There will be plays written and now abandoned, music composed and now discarded, hours of rehearsals wasted and the joy of millions defeated.

But wait until next year!  We will return.

• Its not even a Kingsize bed!