Here's
my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury – reflections on a week spent with the contradictions of Edinburgh in Festival. All comments welcomed.
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"YOU know, we really have to blame the politicians for all this”, said the ancient, modulated voice from the front row. “Clinton wanted us to give mortgages to the blacks, and we did so. Bush wanted us to give mortgages to the Hispanics, and we did that too. Yes, I'm a banker. But why blame me?”
You couldn't script it. But as I came to the conclusion of my week both working for, and wandering around, the Edinburgh International Book Festival – and the city in general – it struck me that Edinburgh is a place which has a very distinct script indeed, running away beneath the milling bourgeoisie and shilling performers of the season.
The voice at the beginning was piping up at the end of a session with the journalist John Lanchester, explaining his funny, furious account of the financial crisis, Whoops! But with every elegant and well-informed question from the audience – “Shouldn't we blame profit-driven ratings agencies like Moody's?”, “What about a kite mark for banks who submit to a liquidity-based levy?” - you slowly realised where you were.
This is a city filled with hordes of financial “innovators” (and maybe a few traditionalists), who naturally knew how to “speak Money”, as Lanchester put it.
Listen to the Weegie, some of you might be muttering: where was he during the last ten years of Goodwinolatry, exponential house prices, Harvey Nichols? Mostly either 51.3 miles west or in London, as it happens: Edinburgh is experientially stranger to me than both Camden or Hillhead. It usually drags me over, or upwards, because its concentrations of capital – political, financial and cultural – are too strong to resist.
And are they concentrated! My fellow denizen of the dark, pundit Gerry Hassan, wrote this week that he preferred Glasgow's Aye Write literary festival to Edinburgh's as it was “less luvvie” and more connected to the locals. That's a daft critique. The sheer encyclopaedic ambition of the EIBF is such that they should be bussing ideas-starved Glaswegians over everyday, in order that they can grasp the contemporary world-system properly.
In terms of the sessions I directly participated in – on the new world order, the nature of happiness, the power of computer games – never mind the score or so I attended (covering genetic enhancement, the roots of prosperity, how books are better for our brains than the Net) – I've left the place feeling like my synapses are on bodybuilder's powder.
You'd be a chump to undervalue the cosmopolitan, worldly power of festive Edinburgh. The session on transhuman improvement felt at times like a cross between that scene in the new Star Trek movie – the one where Spock scans the history of the known universe in his learning pod - and a Monty Python gig (that bit thanks to Iain M.Banks). All sponsored by some new genomic department at Edinburgh University. Feels like a Second Enlightenment to me.
But true to the dynamic of the first Edinburgh Enlightenment, the big-picture thinkers are right next to the political wheeler-dealers and ambitious merchants. Which provides an opportunity for those oppositionalists who know a coherent establishment when they see one. There were some interesting, aquiline, mildly unkempt and grimly determined types striding through the city this week – quite evidently Climate Campers descending into the city for provisions.
I'd read a story in the Sundays about an Edinburgh company I'd never heard of before – Cairn Energy – and was gripped by their sheer centrality to the environmental debate: embracing high-technology and high-risk to drill under the Arctic ice for the black, black oil. The Campers, and Greenpeace, had picked them out for especial protestation.
Could a small country's business sector be messing around in anything more acutely, anxiously global? As the National Theatre of Scotland's Caledonia got the critical thumbs-down for its pantomining of the Darien disaster, Sir Bill Gammell, the ex-rugby-hero of Cairn (pals not just with Tony Blair, but also George Bush) was out on his own buccaneering mission for access and resources.
It reminded me of Christopher Harvie's comment in Fool's Gold. about the North Sea representing as big a technical challenge as a NASA space program to the Moon. Engineering no more, in the Proclaimers' words? Clearly not. Addressing the right set of energy futures? Extremely debatable. But I can sit for months in Glasgow, and be lost in family, football, music, jogging, fail-safe humour and tech podcasts from Boston. It takes a visit to Edinburgh to realise your own country actually resides in the crazy, conflictual modern world.
Don't get me wrong: Glasgow has its own intellectual and productive energies, its counterculture and bohemias, which you'll hear all about here. But despite its branding exercises over the years, there's something less integrated about Glasgow – something to do with its extremes of poverty and wealth, its human black holes and glittering palaces. And perhaps also, the implosion of the kind of social movements that would turf up a Jimmy Reid – or as we're given these days, Tommy Sheridan (avert your eyes).
As I got my final train home, the number one Glasgow story before me was that the entrepreneur Stefan King had relaunched The Corinthian Club. “Silver thrones, giant lettering and hologram lights set the tone in one room while mirrors, chandeliers and a catwalk fit out the next”. Painted spoons in Henderson's, my favourite veggie restaurant in Hanover Street, it ain't. And whatever you do, in this part of the Belt, don't follow the money.