Edinburgh Travel Drinking with Dick Holder

And so we come to it! If we're talking places to go to get intoxicated, it was only

ever going to be a matter of time before I ended up at the Edinburgh Festival.

And here is the greatest compliment I can pay the Scottish capital: I have almost

no recollection of it, and yet my journal tells me I was there for six days. Fucking

smart!

When I returned home, I swore blind that I wouldn't wind up writing an article that

was awash with haggis, bagpipes, whisky, tartan, lochs, whisky and Braveheart. What would be the point of

regurgitating a load of national stereotypes for comic effect?

Actually, comic effect would be the point. But I'm above cheap laughs! (No I'm not. Keep reading for the

anecdote about over-sized genitals.)

I have to say, though, the Scots haven't made avoiding traditional stereotypes a particularly easy task. The first

moment I opened the car door honestly, the first moment my ears were filled with a bagpiped rendition of

Scotland The Brave, a tune that I was to hear every four to five minutes over the next few days. What's more, I

found places where you can stand in the city centre and catch a version of it, slightly failing to harmonise with someone else's Amazing Grace. I won't even try and describe how that sounds; suffice it to say any simile would involve the word "strangling".

It's not just the tartan/kilt/bagpipe image that Edinburgh's brimming with. Check this out, from the very first Scottish gift shop I visited: a t-shirt bearing the legend "So long as there are but one hundred of us alive we will never yield to the domination of the English."

Yes!! English bastards! Freedo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-om!!!

And as for the hard-drinking stereotype, the Scots seem to be positively falling over themselves to play up to that one. I saw an advert on the side of a bus, the main point being that you need a constant supply of fresh water to make whisky, for which the tag line was:

"In Scotland, it rains for 312 days of the year. Brilliant!"

Just to round off the clichés perfectly, I happened upon a guy on the Royal Mile who was dressed as Mel Gibson in

Braveheart and was extorting money from tourists wanting to have their photograph taken with him. Short of

hearing someone actually saying "och aye the noo", that pretty much ticked off the last box on my stereotype list.

So I figured the way to see past the Shortbread Tin image of Scotland was to find a pub and get talking to some

actual real people.

Happily, that had been my plan all along.

The Royal Mile, running east from Edinburgh Castle, is where most of the Festival's street theatre takes place, so I took in a pint there before watching the acts. Spying a cosy-looking watering hole called Ensign Ewart, I was a little puzzled to find the landlady manning the door. She told me, "Ah'm sorry. Ye can't use the toilet."

"Oh," I said, bemused and suddenly needing a slash with surprising urgency, "why not?"

"Ah'm afraid thaiy're for paying customers awnly."

Interesting. What qualified me as apparently not being a paying customer? I don't want to malign myself, but I genuinely don't think I have the physique or attitude of someone who usually avoids pubs in favour of gyms. When I voiced words to this effect, the landlady apologised profusely and explained that the legions of festival tourists that descend upon the city have a habit of treating every bar like a public toilet (and by that I don't mean they just piss on the counter). I joked with her about "the bloody tourists", singularly failing to register the irony, and headed inside for a pint of Scotland's own McEwan's.

At this point I got talking to a couple of heavy-set Glaswegians, who were also over for the festivities, and after five or ten minutes of fairly intense conversation I started to piece together the occasional sentence.

"What d'ye think tae Scoattish lassies, eh?"

"Scottish lassies?" I double-checked.

"Aye!"

"I like that bouncy-up-and-down Highland dancing they do," I said.

"Ah'll bet ye dae, ya randy bassard!" the guy shouted as he mimed hefty bouncing breasts to illustrate his

point.

The three of us subsequently laughed like hyenas for thirty-five minutes. And at that point I realised that my research was complete. It doesn't matter where you are; grab a drunk guy down the pub anywhere in the world and he'll be making a joke about boobs before you've even introduced yourself.

And, by the way, I wasn't lying about liking the traditional Scottish dance. A few days earlier I'd been up at the Highland Games in a place called Helmsdale, on the north-east coast, and I saw a display there. It struck me, while I was watching the young lassies, that Highland dancing basically looks like A-Level Jumping On The Spot combined with some fairly complicated semaphore, but it does make for a bizarrely hypnotic display.

Actually, to go off on a tangent for a moment, there was an Emigrants' memorial statue on the Games site that featured a supremely muscle-bound, kilt-clad Scotsman, in striding pose. As I stood and perused his kilt, forever fixed in a billowing position, the perhaps inevitable questions flashed across my mind, "I wonder if they bothered sculpting the under-kilt area? And I wonder if the rumours are true?"

Okay, I'll plead guilty to maybe missing the point while studying a memorial to forced emigration during the Highland clearances, but the thought was already out there by then. And thus I was fated to follow in the footsteps of thousands before me and sneak a glance between the gentleman's legs while no one was looking. I can therefore confirm, ladies, that the rumours are indeed true, and I've never felt so small and inadequate in my entire life.

Come to think of it, you'd need rocks the size of cricket balls to participate in one of the games I then watched: vertical weight throwing.

I'll say that again. Vertical weight throwing!

I can fully get on board with feats of strength that involve throwing lethally heavy weights away from you, but can you spot a flaw with a sport that entails hurling massive blocks straight up in the air? Surely it doesn't take more than a passing knowledge of physics to figure out the logical conclusion?

Anyway, back to Edinburgh, and my lairy, occasionally coherent companions. When I'd finished my drink

with them, I headed outside to take in the street theatre.

Now, I've got to go out on a limb here. Please don't hate me.

Is it just me, or is street theatre ever so slightly crap? Okay, there, I said it.

Yes, I know it adds life and vibrancy to a city, and yes, I know it de-mystifies the performance arts for the general public, but don't you find there's just something about it that's vaguely annoying? Brilliant, you can juggle. Ingenious, you're singing unaccompanied opera. Hooray, you can stand really still while painted completely silver. Thank you for enriching my life by displaying the extremes of human achievement.

We get that last group of "performers" back home in Bath as well. The tourists seem to lap it up, but oh my god, do I not see the attraction? If you're that amazed by an individual remaining inhumanly stationary, you could just sit and stare at my mate Dave the day after he's scored an ounce. It would have the same effect.

Okay, let me nip this in the bud. Because I don't want to sound like I'm missing

the point. It goes without saying there's a huge amount more to the

Edinburgh Festival than street performers on the Royal Mile. And the shows I

took in were absolutely storming! Perhaps the weirdest of them was "The

Ladyboys Of Bangkok". No, honestly, I've got a girlfriend. It's just confusing;

that's all.

I took a pit-stop at the extremely fancy Deacon Brodie's (which was Fit Women

Central, by the way) and clanged back another couple of pints admiring the

garage-style décor of the Filling Station, and it was at this point that my journal

notes start to become a bit hazy.

What? You think that was negligent? I don't think a 1400-word article is all

that bad for a determined alcoholic.

You send Charles Kennedy on a bender in Scotland; see how far that gets you.