On the Fringe of Edinburgh

AS THE CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND, Edinburgh is home to the country’s houses of government and its highest courts. It’s also where you find Edinburgh Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and the historic churches of St. Giles, Greyfriars, and the Canongate. Not to mention the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, and the Scottish National Gallery. It’s centerpiece of higher learning is the University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582. The city is so steeped in antiquity that has a section called New Town that turns out to have been built in the 18th and 19th centuries. But it also has the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I wish someone had warned me about this.

There are actually two festivals with a certain amount of spread: the Edinburgh International Festival, which presents the more high-culture offerings, like opera and ballet (although there’s much else), and the Fringe, which takes over the town in August to give well over 3,000 different shows in nearly 300 venues.

And we showed up just as the Fringe was getting underway. Actually, I wasn’t quite so innocent of it. I’d learned through Facebook that my friend Amy Engelhardt, former member of “The Bobs” and a keen actor-singer-songwriter, was presenting a solo show there, so we had tickets even before leaving New York. But let’s enjoy our arrival day, which was Sunday, August 6.

Once again, we booked a limo to drag luggage, transport chair, and, of course, us from Manchester to Edinburgh, and our driver introduced himself as Francesco, a native of Spain who had settled some time ago in Scotland. Once again, we wrestled with the etiquette of how much we should annoy the driver with our chatter. The problem solved itself as we drove.

We built a scenic stop into this leg of the journey, stopping at a National Trust site called Sizergh that consisted of a castle and, of course, some beautiful gardens. Touring the castle is a large part of the site’s appeal, but I decided not to challenge my walking ability and sent Susan on in by herself, where she joined a tour and had a fabulous time. I sat on a bench outside the building, which I soon shared with a woman waiting for the next tour. She told me that she had recently discovered that a great-aunt had been employed as a maid at Sizergh back when it was still a fully functioning stately home, and had met her great-uncle there. My bench-mate was eager to see where these ancestors had toiled.

Manchester to Edinburgh is a four-hour, 200-plus miles drive, most of it along the M6 motorway, although the designation changes when you cross into Scotland and it becomes the A74(M), itself a renaming of what had been known simply as the M74 and still is north of Abington, save for a rogue M74 sign still in place just as you cross into Scotland at Gretna Green. We were spared some of that confusion because at Abington we veered onto the A702, taking straight into Edinburgh.

If there’s a talented tourist board that planned this business of strewing sheep across the verdant countryside once we crossed into Scotland, my hat’s off to them. It’s such a remarkable transition that it had to be deliberate. In any event, it encouraged my wife to exclaim regularly, if not tautologically, “Oh, look! More sheep!” And, indeed, they dotted the countryside as if painted there specifically for tourist photos.

Out of respect for our driver’s continued silence, we engaged him in no more than the necessary conversation. As we neared our destination, however, he started chatting a little. His name was Francesco. Born in Spain, he had traveled (and driven) quite a bit before settling in Edinburgh, crossing many a national border. We confessed that it was our first time in this city. Perhaps it was the enthusiasm of a transplant that prompted him to offer suggestions about where to go and what to say, and then he asked, “Do you have some time? Would you like me to give you a tour?”

We plunged into the heart of Edinburgh. Francesco said that it’s always people-filled, but the August arts festivals exponentially increase those numbers. He pointed out Edinburgh Castle, looming over the city on top of Castle Rock (upon which one castle or another has stood for nearly a thousand years), and described the Royal Mile, a succession of streets leading to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Where it was once the processional route of monarchs, it’s now shops and restaurants and other tourist attractions. Francesco noted that it would be far and away the most crowded part of the city. We skirted some of the performance venues, their periphery ringed with posters of fresh-faced artistes. The 45-minute tour finished back at our hotel, the Murrayfield, where we admired the old-world feel of the exterior and foyer, and groaned with dismay when told we’d been assigned an upstairs room.

It was the first and, as it would turn out, only snag on this trip – at least until we docked in Brooklyn, but that’s for a forthcoming piece. I explained (remain polite, Byron, even though you feel self-conscious as hell spewing your Yank accent) that it had been a conditional of this booking that our room be on the ground floor. That I was leaning on a cane reinforced this statement, along with our need to stash my transport chair on the ground floor. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and up the stairs we went. I always have difficulty with that climb, but is it possible that, with the staircase well in sight of the desk, that I wavered and hobbled with more exaggeration? Indeed, it took me a while to ascend. We hadn’t begun to unpack when our room phone rang, and shortly thereafter we were shown to our new room, nicely situated below.

As close as we got Edinburgh Castle

Francesco had recommended we try a goofy buffet eatery called the Toby Carvery. As of this year, there are 152 units throughout the UK, with three of them in Edinburgh – one of those a scant two miles from our lodging. It bills itself as the Home of the Sunday Roast, the idea being that your meat is carved to order while you help yourself, as often as you like, to the side-dishes. The place is large. The place was crowded. Nevertheless, we were shown to a table quickly, ordered our drinks, and lined up at the carving station to witness the young man wielding the knives slice the smallest, thinnest possible pieces of roast beef, turkey, and ham. But I’ve never seen Yorkshire pudding offered at a buffet before, so I satisfied myself with a big hunk of that childhood favorite alongside potatoes, cabbage, and the like. It was a worthy recommendation.

In a bid to join the 21st century, I set up an Uber account in Edinburgh, and that easily got us to and from the restaurant. The following day we forced our driver into the city’s viscera in order to see “Impact,” Amy Engelhardt’s solo show, which I wrote about here. With so many shows going on in this neighborhood throughout the day and night, the nearby restaurants also swell to capacity.

But we found a table, after a short wait, a brief walk away at Doctors pub. It’s an historic site, across the street from what once was a Royal Infirmary. The building was originally owned by a coffin-maker and undertaker, even as it housed a maker of artificial limbs and bandages to the nearby infirmary. It became a barbecue restaurant in the 1960s and a pub a decade later. I order steak and ale pie (tasty!), Susan has sausages. I have a dark ale, Susan has – I don’t even remember, so non-threatening was the fluid she consumed. Our return-journey Uber driver, Lukasz, was from Poland and shared his experience as an immigrant whose heritage is often disparaged in the UK. We confessed that the US shares that problem, but he already knew that.

Lunch at The Doctors

Tuesday was a busier day for us and for Edinburgh. Uber prices doubled (from £12 to £24) during our walk from the room to the sidewalk, but we discovered that we could hail a regular cab through the Uber app, thus getting a £12 to the Fringe theaters area.

Our next book acquisition – remember how I pledged to collect no books while on this trip? – occurred later that day. Susan had spotted a magazine in the hotel with Bridget Christie on the cover, a comedian we knew from British panel shows like “QI.” Having never seen her actual comedy material, we took advantage of two-for-one Tuesday to snag tickets.

“Who Am I?” is Christie’s tribute to menopause, among other women-centric topics, and, as much as it spoke to me as the husband of one who trudged through that phase, it hit right home as far as Susan was concerned. Christie is an observational comic who personalizes her bits with deft physicality. From her opening, which had me worried that she truly was unable to remember what used to be simple to summon, to the finish, where an extended bit about a flasher in the park hilariously called back much that had gone before, it was a show as insightful as it was funny.

We stopped by the lobby table afterward, where Christie sat selling and signing her book “A Book for Her.” I convinced a reluctant Susan that we should buy and have it signed, which we did, although I felt distinctly out of step with the themes of the show being so patriarchically pushy.

Amy Engelhardt had recommended a solo show by her friend Marc Burrows titled “The Magic of Terry Pratchett.” and it was indeed an extremely entertaining presentation, dimmed only by the fact that I’ve never read anything by Pratchett. Burrows surveyed the audience at the end of his show, and I discovered that I was the only one there so literarily bereft (not really, but Susan wasn’t courageous enough to speak up). Thus was I awarded one Pratchett’s many novels. Thus bringing our books-to-schlep count up to six.

It’s early evening as we emerge from the show, and the street in front of us is crowded with restaurants, each of them crowded with people. Not caring about price or cuisine, we stop at each and each one apologetically turns us away. Not until we’ve walked a ways up aside street do we find a place with an available table – a Japanese restaurant called Koyama, which proves to be very nice. We not only end up chatting with adjacent diners but also spotting Bridget Christie trying to book a table. I compliment her on her show, hiding, I hope, my fanboy excitement. She and her companion are sitting at an outdoor table as we’re leaving, and I notice that they’re then invited inside. I think the table she gets was ours.

Next stop: London.