Edinburgh Day 7
Aug. 25th, 2012 07:52 amA truncated day. M and I spend most of the morning going to the nearest post office and parcelling up the books to be posted home. Eventually we are finished and we have lunch at a small French café on Broughton Street – baguettes and tarts and coffee. Then we try to get a bus to the Pleasance, but the automated timetable for the number 8 bus says there are none for half an hour and the two at once. We decide to walk.
Helen Keen, Robot Woman of Tomorrow, is entertaining enough, but the venue is very hot and I nod off a couple of times. Then K wants to go to Waverley to buy a ticket for tomorrow. We stagger down the hill to the flat.
Dinner with L at L’Escargot Bleu. They have run out of truffle liqueur for the aperitifs, oh noes! But things get better. I have oysters, with traditional accompaniments, and seaweed butter for the bread. Then rabbit leg with prunes, the meat sweet and tender, the sauce sweet and rich. We drink a very nice red wine called Le Chataignier. Karen and I share cheese for pudding. Nice cheese, the quantities a bit scanty.
Then back up the hill to the Book Festival to see Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billington. We are determined to get there in time, and in the end spend about fifteen minutes in a very long queue. I am not sure what we were expecting – we booked it because both M and I like Christopher Brookmyre, and neither of us had heard of the other bloke. Traditionally the book festival is rather genteel. This is a riot.
The authors stand on the stage side by side, exchanging anecdotes that are increasingly obscene and hilarious, reading out readers’ emails and discussing the BBC’s policy on swear words. Brookmyre once submitted a radio play with forty instances of the F word. Forty was deemed to be too many. He was allowed fifteen. They wondered whether writers could organise to share quotas, and whether they might be allowed to swap five F words for a C word. It was funnier than any of the stand-up shows we had been to, and the audience was screaming with laughter. A fitting end to the holiday.