Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Sunday 25/08/2024

Reviewed today: Before And After Coal, The Modern Portrait.

The last day of these things is always tricky. Last day when the trains are disrupted - well, that's trickier, but we've dealt with that in the past. Last day when the trains are disrupted and it's a Sunday, though? Who knows what sort of mess that'll turn into? (Well, obviously I do, because I'm writing this on the following Wednesday.)

Having said that, the Pals all know by now that we're working to a strict checkout time when we're staying at Napier, and everyone's packed and ready to go by 10am. In a normal year, we'd all be pottering around town all day before meeting up again for a late afternoon train back to London, but that's not going to be happening today. We're taking multiple alternative approaches to the problem of getting back home: travelling the day before the disruption, or travelling the day after, or taking the bus, or taking a rail route with a massive diversion in the middle, or going by plane.

The BBG and I have chosen to take the plane, and have worked out a neat selection of morning activities before our mid-afternoon flight. First we go to the bus station, and dump our baggage in one of their lockers, which in a weirdly 20th century twist still haven't been converted to use credit cards and will only take coins. We head down the road to The Square for a shot of coffee, because don't forget we were out clubbing last night. And then just across from there is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which is the perfect place to spend a hungover hour or so on a Sunday morning.

There are multiple exhibits on display, but we've chosen to focus on two in particular. The Modern Portrait is a national portrait gallery doing exactly what it should be doing: curating a smashing collection of some of the most famous Scots from the 20th and 21st century, with a cool photo of Ncuti Gatwa acting as the most recent entry. It's a broad collection in a variety of media, with plenty of glorious highlights - the sheer joy of John Byrne's contributions (familiar from the exhibit he had here the last time we visited this building), the stained-glass gorgeousness of Calum Stevenson's portrait of EIF boss Nicola Benedetti, and the eerieness of Ken Currie's Three Oncologists. This exhibition doesn't appear to have an end date, so pop along to it when you can.

The other one we visit is Before And After Coal, which is at the gallery until September 15th. This one has a few layers to it: the innermost layer is a collection of photos that Milton Rogovin took in 1982 of a number of Scottish mining communities, documenting their work and home lives. Nobody knew at the time that just two years later, we'd have the miners' strike and the ultimate destruction of the whole industry. Forty years on from that, Nicky Bird has taken Rogovin's photos back to what's left of those communities, and put together a commentary in both words and pictures that reflects on what happened to the people in the original pictures, which are displayed alongside the new material. It's a very thoughful bit of political art, and we possibly didn't give it as much time as it deserved, which is a shame. But we've got places to be.

We head back to the bus station and get our bags from the lockers. That goes well.

We take the tram to Edinburgh Airport. That goes well.

We meet Lesley for lunch at BrewDog Edinburgh Airport, five years after our previous visit. That goes well.

We take the easyJet to Luton Airport. That goes well.

We take the shuttle from the airport to Luton Airport Parkway station. That goes well.

Standing on the platform at Luton Airport Parkway, we let the 1725 train go through, because we're smart and know that the 1732 will actually get us into London first. Writing this a few days later, I couldn't tell you for certain if the 1725 sailed through to London without interruptions. All I know is that shortly after that, we're told that the 1732 will be delayed due to problems with the track and the overhead wires.

And then they start saying the same thing about the train after that, and the train after that, and the train after that. It's a good 45 minutes at least before someone's prepared to admit that there's nothing running on the line at all, and that may be the case for the rest of the day. By this time, of course, there are five or so trains' worth of passengers standing on the platform and getting more and more grumpy. Particularly as the usual fallback they'd have in this sort of situation - rail replacement buses - won't work today, as all the rail replacement buses are out covering for the scheduled disruption which is why we're in Luton in the first place.

Thankfully, Lesley's a bit more familiar with exit routes out of Luton than we are. We get the shuttle back to Luton Airport, and within a few minutes we're in a queue for a Green Line bus that'll take us back to civilisation. It takes about an hour to get there, during which the Pals WhatsApp group becomes a flurry of stories about each of our adventures on the journey home. But the important thing is, at the end of it all, we get home.

(In case you're wondering why this writeup is so late, it's partly because no writing got done on Sunday because of the train debacle, and no writing got done on Monday because Typepad went down for a few hours and nearly wiped out an entire page of work. Sorry about that.)

So now I've been home for a couple of days, a few thoughts on how I felt about the whole thing. (More thoughts to follow from the Pals shortly, hopefully.)

It's been good to have all four festivals firing on more or less full power, particularly with the Film Festival looking like it was at death's door almost two years ago. We didn't get to see any absolute stunners, but Sunlight and Since Yesterday were both notable. Similarly, the Book Festival's move to its new location at the Edinburgh Futures Institute hasn't done it any harm, but there's nothing that really leaps out from what we saw. The BBG is a bit concerned that this time around, we stuck with already familiar names and didn't go to any talks purely on the basis of their subject matter, and I think she's got a point. We'll try harder next year.

At the International Festival, it was a tremendously good year for music: in fact, that's all we did there this year, with no theatre or opera or anything like that. A festival that's capable of putting Cat Power's Dylan tribute and the Estonian/Scottish bagpipe bonanza in the same programme must be doing something right.

As for the Fringe... there was a weird realisation about a week before we went up that we'd not planned to see much comedy at all. That changed pretty quickly, partly down to our Antipodean Taskmaster fetish. Of that batch of comics, Two Hearts came up with what was easily my favourite show of the year, with Guy Montgomery’s Guy-Mont Spelling Bee just about living up to the sky-high expectations I brought to it. For pure stand-up, nobody's doing it better this year than Nish Kumar: and for delightful all-ages whimsy, it turns out that John Hegley is still a master of it some forty years after he first started. I know some of the Pals might be horrified by the microscopic amount of theatre we caught this year, but My English Persian Kitchen is up there with the very best, and is getting a London run in September if any of you are curious and, well, near to London. Bring your appetite.

So that's it for Edinburgh 2024. We had a great time, even if it did feel like all of the British railway operators were conspiring against us to mess things up. Maybe I should start looking into alternative methods of transport for 2025 now. Being a monkey, and all.