The Ned Wood Archive

Chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature

Saturday morning.  Like most Saturday mornings, I’m off into town.  It’s a habit.  Sometimes down to Bruce’s on Rose St and Virgin on Frederick St to browse through all the albums I wanted to get but couldn’t justify the expense of or maybe to pick up a seven inch that had just come out.  Sometimes to find a second hand book shop or two and get a couple of old paperbacks.  Sometimes just to get out of the house and wander around.

This Saturday is different.  No-one is around in the flat because it’s the middle of August and most of the undergrads are on the long vac, probably working to earn much needed readies for holidaying to get much needed sunlight.  I’m still around because I’ve got to get ready for the Big Trip South.  Make sure the department’s old Renault 4 is ship-shape for the journey.  Make sure I’ve got all the equipment I need: maps, hammers, sampling containers, compasses, spirit levels, notebooks, pencils, all manner of weird bits and pieces.  Make sure my brain’s in the right place.  That’s the official reason, and I will get round to that soon.  But, to be honest, my brain is 99% not thinking about The Trip.  It’s got so much else to focus on.

It’s that time of year. For eleven months of the year, this city wears its dark grey suit every day. You look at it and you can see that It’s a smart sober suit, nothing flashy, nothing too wide in the lapel or at the ankle; buttons on the cuffs and turn-ups on the trousers. You may occasionally get a a glimpse of the lining and you ask yourself, that looks a little on the bright side, did I really see that? But it doesn’t show for long. Then August arrives and the city takes off the coat of its suit, turns it inside out, and shows off the wonderful, colourful lining made up of an explosion of bright red roses, cool blue irises, happy yellow sunflowers, pure white lilies, warm orange chrysanthemums, dark purple violets, and soothing green foliage.

I get to the Mile and I’ve stepped into a compendium of characters.  The strange unwashed and happily slightly dazed.  After a year of living up here, I’ve got used to the fact that there is no end to the surprises that this wonderful place throws up.  The exotic buildings.  The secret closes.  The wild parks.  And on this August morning, there is a new facet.  A collection of artists, performers, jokers, musicians, and fakers roaming up and down the High Street between the bridges, some of them juggling, some clowning, some posing, almost all in costume, almost all handing out papers, sheets, flyers, and advertisements for an explosion of entertainment.  This, then, is the start of the Edinburgh fringe.  

Here on the mile is the first Queen Elizabeth chatting to the queen from Alice in Wonderland with her guard of cards.  Over here is a fish out of water and a caterpillar trying to avoid a devil all in red.  There are two Shakespeares, both with wispy beards, tights, and frilly knickers but one with a lot more hair than the other.  Here is a cowboy chatting up an Aunt Sally.  And is that a Judy being chased by a big-nosed Punch?  I’ll bet there is an angel somewhere nearby, dressed in austere grey, walking nobly up the High Street, her elegant wings carefully folded across her back. I see a handful of hippies in massive flared trousers and long-haired wigs and some lads dressed as Marilyn Monroe with more outrageous wigs and unflattering short skirts.  There are doctors and nurses and firemen and posties and ballet dancers and acrobats.  Hamlet with a skull.  Two tramps with violins.  Three lasses in long dinner dresses also with violins. 

I’d been warned about it.  I’d been told to get in early and buy a ticket or two before the festival kicked off, and I had, but not really knowing what to expect, I’d only bothered with a couple of obvious events.  Rowan Atkinson who’d just got famous at George Square and a Shakespeare – the Scottish play, of course – on Lawnmarket.  I soon learned that there was so much more to see but that you had to face up to never being able to see everything you’d want to see. In fact, the best way to enjoy the festival was to take risks.  Jump in and try something you’d not heard of or weren’t sure about.  Try something unusual.  Try something just because it was there.  It was like opening up geodes. Sometimes they turned out to be just ordinary lumps of rock. Other times, you cracked them open to find arrays of glorious amethyst crystals gazing back at you. Like the play about two old coppers talking about their favourite assassin in an old church up near the castle.  Or some American students pretending to be Harpo Marx and Humphrey Bogart.  Or some scary horror in the University gym.  Or even some Kafka.  And keep your ears open to what gets recommended.  And avoid the endless Chekhov plays.  

I quickly got the bug and went mad and binged.  Except for the day I took the old Renault 4 down to a place in Leith to get it checked over and ready for the long haul over the alps.  Not that it did any good, because the fan belt snapped going round Lake Geneva just after I’d picked up one of the post docs who was going to introduce me to the Italian prof I was going to be working with.  Or maybe getting the car checked over did help and I would have had many more breakdowns on the trip and would have been late for the rendezvous at Geneva station.  Guess we’ll never know.       

So I spent two weeks of August visiting various old churches and bars and school halls and theatres down back roads that I never knew existed in suburbs and towns, old and new, watching a mix of classics, obscure plays, heroes, villains, reimaginings, new ideas, reviews, concerts, and dances.  I saw comedians, some deliberately hilarious, others accidentally so. I even went to one of the big venues on George Street to watch a group of visitors from Spain do some flamenco dancing.  Elegance, style, precision, beauty, and pathos.  So different from anything I’d seen before. This place is like an iceberg. Only 10% of it is visible above the surface.

And I met Sarah for the first time in ages.  She tried to get me to go to her folk clubs again, but I laughed and said no thankyou which I came to regret years later.  I wasn’t into folk music until later.  Yeah, I listened to a bit of Simon & Garfunkel cos someone at Southampton really liked them and Cat Stevens cos Anna Mulcahy’s best mate was a fan; but they’re not so much folk as pop.  And I’d been persuaded to buy Harvey Andrews cos folk back at home listened to him.  But I wasn’t about to go to any folk club that summer.  Pity, but I didn’t get into Dick Gaughan and Eric Bogle until I’d listened to Billy Bragg and I didn’t get into Jeanie Redpath until I’d listened to Dick Gaughan.

One day, I’m outside Deacon Brodie’s.  I’m walking past the pub up the Lawnmarket, just passing the time, dodging the tourists, when I hear this delightfully tinny synthesised riff.  An electro pop version of Heinz’s “Just like Eddie” turned all the way up to eleven and then when it gets to the chorus I hear “Just like Neddy” shouted out from a window above me.  Upon the hill, they’re playin’ still.  Just like Neddy.  Nessie is up in that flat on the Royal Mile just up from Brodie’s overlooking the tourist track.  Such a wonderful place to just sit and watch the world go by.  She calls me up and gives me a cuppa and sits me down in the front room so we can watch and comment on all of the folk outside.  Me, Nessie, and this massive black and white poster she has of James Dean in a black roll neck sweater who watches, impassive and unimpressed from the wall next to the window.  Kat has moved in with her.  It turns out Kat had been living with her grandmother over near Holyrood Park and she’d finally decided to join the student population and live in a student flat.  So she’d moved in with Nessie, into that wonderful flat on the Mile.  And here’s the thing.  Kat’s grandmother was living over by Holyrood Park because this is where she’s from.  She moved down south when she got married and moved back when her husband died.  So the secret is out.  English Kat is a quarter Scottish.  We have to change her name.  She’s now “only-three-quarters-English Kat”.  

So we sat in the flat and they played me the new Silicon Teens single, which we all agreed was better than the other two, because, much as we both loved the Normal, we both thought Memphis and Judy in Disguise were tinny and cheap.  Just Like Eddie, was excellent, though.  And Kat and Nessie both sang it for me.  A couple of kooks hung up on romancing.  Raving mad and somewhat slightly dazed.

Then, some other day, I ended up in the basement of a house on George Square just near the library.  I was attracted by an advert announcing West Ham v Hearts, but I ended up watching some Welsh students from Aberystwyth or Lampeter or somewhere doing some sketches about ancient Brits.  It was only a small place, like we were sitting in someone’s front room on their sofas watching TV together.  There can’t have been more than about fifteen people in the room.  The performance was fairly mundane most of it, to be honest.  But my jaw hit the floor half way through when one of the skits was about an ancient Brit tribal chief being “crowned”.  They brought in this cardboard box which the chief sat on and was lauded with various cloaks and laurels and presented with various sticks and stones and feted with extravagant praise from his tribe.  And, as the chiefs stood up to walk off loaded with all of his new gifts like the winner off the Generation Game, one of the tribe lifted up the cardboard box and held it up to the audience.   There, clearly on the side, was the image of a sword.  Gav’s sword!

I got in touch with Gav and twisted his arm to come down to try and catch another performance before the run ended.  It wasn’t selling out so we did manage to get in again later when he was down.  He was more excited than I was and jumped on the actors after they’d finished.  He asked them what the cardboard represented and they told us they got the idea from some old Welsh myth about ancient tribes.  None of them were very clear about it, but it seems that they’ve heard stories about an old rite involving a stone marked with a sword.  I told Gav it probably meant nothing.  They’d probably read stuff about King Arthur and had used a bit of artistic licence.  But you could see he thought it was more important.