Brian Ferguson’s diary
RESIDENT IBIZA DJ
With the festivals playing out to the annual chorus of complaints about Edinburgh (or at least parts of it) being too over-crowded, too commercialised and too noisy, it’s hard to avoid becoming a grizzled old cynic.
That makes it all the better when a single show revives your faith in the festivals – and in the human spirit into the bargain – over the course of 90 minutes.
Such is the spell cast in a small church hall, just along from the Sainsbury’s on South Clerk Street, where Canadian actress Rebecca Northan’s show Blind Date is winning hearts, minds and souls.
The premise, delightfully simple but daring, is that Rebecca Northan’s clownish character selects an audience member, who has given permission to be a “maybe” on arrival at the venue, to meet her for a blind date in a Parisian cafe.
Software engineer Chris was splendidly transformed from a softly spoken geeky software engineer to an unlikely romantic and comedic hero the night I was there, with he and Northan winning one of the most heartfelt send-offs you’ll see in Edinburgh this month.
• A cause very close to the hearts of the Underbelly team is its annual Big Brain Tumour Benefit, which filled the Mcewan Hall and raised more than £41,000 for research into brain tumours.
The annual event, held for a third time this week, was instigated after director Ed Bartlam’s son Alfie was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2016 when he was four years of age.
Russell Howard, Jason Byrne, Nina Conti, Danny Bhoy, Iain Stirling, Flo & Joan, and John Hastings were among the comics to appear at the event, which saw more than £2,000 raised in bucket collections alone on the night.
• While the Book Festival is blessed with a huge round-the-clock operation to get authors in front of audiences in good time, the pace of life in Charlotte Square can be deceptively slow. Such as the draw of the relaxed atmosphere on offer, particularly when the sun shines, that it can be hard moving at anything above snail’s pace along its crowded paths and filling every seat in a sold-out venue is clearly a complex and testing task.
Fair play then to Alexander Mccall Smith for providing free entertainment for his army of eager followers while they waited for him to appear – with a musical friend, Ian Laing, reeling off a host of traditional fiddle tunes in his kilt before the author took to the stage.
Meanwhile Mccall Smith has reported that residents of Moray Place Gardens are giving him grief for his long-running, and somewhat cheeky, campaign to promote it as Scotland’s nudist capital – most recently in these pages last week in his alternative guide for visitors to the city, where he said “wearing clothing is discouraged” in the area.