Modern life is rubbish Only the rats aren’t kicking up a stink in Auld Reekie
IN 1979, Bill Forsyth shot a film in Glasgow called That Sinking Feeling, about a gang of goofballs stealing a bunch of stainless steel sinks to improve their socio-economic lot.
It features future Gregory’s Girl stars John Gordon Sinclair and Robert Buchanan as pals Andy and Ronnie, and there’s a neat cameo from Edinburgh-born art impresario Richard Demarco.
He plays himself encountering Ronnie standing next to a pile of pilfered sinks and, assuming it to be an ace piece of conceptual art, offers him £200 for it. Ronnie, bemused but delighted, accepts.
I was reminded of this in Edinburgh on Thursday while strolling between an exhibition on Calton Hill based on the capital’s Common Good register – a list of “common good” properties such as parks, monuments and buildings – and another featuring among its exhibits a sculpture made from three paint pot lids.
It is in a gallery close to where Demarco once had his Demarco European Art Foundation headquarters, funnily enough.
Specifically, it was as I passed a bin beside which someone had placed a doll’s house that I was reminded of Ronnie and his sinks. The doll’s house was large, up to my chest, and far too big to have fitted into the bin, even if the bin wasn’t already crammed with rubbish.
State of the art
WAS this, I wondered, an artwork, one of those site-specific pieces you see dotted about the place during the Edinburgh Art Festival? If not, would someone mistake it for one and offer me £200 for it if I hung around long enough?
Could this be my route to Turner Prize glory, this witty and razor-sharp commentary on [insert something here about consumerism, colonialism, environmentalism or any other ism which floats your boat]?
The answer is no on all counts, so after a few minutes I sloped off to my date with the paint pot lids. Then I went for cake.
But it’s true that there is a strange, weird sculptural quality to the capital’s overflowing bins and a strange, weird irony to the world’s biggest art festival landing in a city now dressed as if for a post-apocalyptic zombie movie by an acid-crazed production designer.
Or, more prosaically, one in which the streets are littered with takeaway coffee cups, cans, burger wrappers and those white Styrofoam coffins they stick black pudding suppers in these days.
It used to be that you needed a fivestar review to grab people’s attention in Edinburgh during the festival, or to be Jerry Sadowitz and grab something else. Now all you have to do is not clear the rubbish away.
It’s all quite Instagramable in its way. And it’s not just me who thinks so, either. A friend posted a lovely picture of one city-centre bin – a nice twilight shot with the Balmoral Hotel in the background and, in the foreground, a flyer-bedecked municipal bin oozing rubbish and topped with takeaway cups. For a neat bit of geographical specificity there was even an Irn-Bru can sitting just right of centre.
Wednesday walkouts
THIS is all about the strike, of course. A near two-week action by refuse collection workers in the capital began on August 18 and involves members of the GMB and Unite unions who have rejected a pay offer of 3 per cent and a revised offer of 5% from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla). On Wednesday, pay talks broke down and staff in 13 other areas walked out, including in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Falkirk.
Deputy First Minister John Swinney met with representatives of Cosla and the unions involved on Thursday and pay talks restarted on Friday. But, on the same day, industrial action spread to areas such as North Lanarkshire, Stirling, Midlothian, and Perth and Kinross.
Nearly all of Scotland is affected but it’s Edinburgh which is at the centre of the storm and Edinburgh which is suffering the reputational damage. “Tarnished” is how the Financial Times describes it.
Clutching placards bearing the slogan “Throwing Edinburgh’s reputation in the bin” alongside a picture of (guess what) an overflowing bin, Scottish MSPs in various shades of Unionism turned up in the trash-strewn Grassmarket for a photo op and some SNP bashing and to underline the point.
Fair enough. The Scottish Government needs to act.
On Friday, the First Minister was in Copenhagen to open the Scottish Government’s Nordic Office and on Monday she is due at the Edinburgh
The rats think Christmas has come early. I’m not sure what the seagulls think, but I imagine they are equally happy
International Book Festival to chat with Brian Cox, better known as potty-mouthed media beast Logan Roy in HBO smash Succession. As a result, she has been accused of being “asleep at the wheel” by Tory MSP Sharon Dowey, apparently too concerned with overseas trips and show-stopping turns at the festival to get a grip of the metaphorical litter pickers.
But this being the Edinburgh Festival you’re never far from a heckler, and so it went with our luckless politicians back in the Grassmarket.
Political mess
VISITORS may be above local politics but it’s a fact lost on nobody who lives in the capital that the City of Edinburgh Council is run by Labour as a minority administration propped up by the Tories and LibDems, the very same people who were waving placards in the Grassmarket. In truth, this is everybody’s problem. Everybody’s mess.
Moreover, many people support the strikes so one act of solidarity, I suppose, is to not to help clean up, even if that flies in the face of whatever notions of community spirit pertain in the capital.
Indeed, The Guardian reported that the Edinburgh Art Festival, the organisation responsible for the shows I visited (and, who knows, maybe that doll’s house “installation”), deleted a tweet it had put out calling for litter pickers to be donated and for artists to gather on the Royal Mile to help clear the streets.
Nobody wants to be accused of being a strike-breaker, even as they are being told to keep their rubbish indoors and warned of the danger of rats. Rats? You betcha. Edinburgh used to smell of old money and fresh beer, courtesy of the city’s now nearextinct brewing industry.
Now there’s also the unmistakeable whiff of decomposing food, congealing and mouldering liquids and – cup your ear, listen hard – the pitter-patter of little feet scurrying between these various al-fresco treats.
A sorry tail
THE rats think Christmas has come early. I’m not sure what the seagulls think, but I imagine they are equally happy. I do know what Terry Levinthal of heritage body the Cockburn Association thinks because he told the BBC: “In a few weeks’ time there will be a massive expansion in the population of vermin because there is just so much food on offer.”
Rat experts concur. It’s simple maths. Did you know two adult rats can produce 2,000 baby rats in a year?
Or that around six weeks after the rubbish is cleared the now-massive rat population will start to invade our homes looking for more things to munch? Or that after the Glasgow dust cart drivers’ strike of 1975, the army had to be called in to help deal with the rats, at one point pushing through a picket line in order to light the city’s main incinerator in Maryhill? No, me neither.
Still, it could be worse. The Edinburgh Festival pretty much ends this weekend but at least the Londoners who are up for it haven’t brought their 40-degree London weather with them.
Nothing rubbish likes more than a good blast of heat to get that bacteria simmering nicely. God bless the workers and God bless the Scottish summer, eh?