Sample

DAY 1
EDINBURGH
I plot my course and have a dental disaster



Now that Scotland is to have its first elected Assembly since 1707, what better place to start my walk? My destination is Greenwich – not the Millennium Dome, but the Royal Observatory, since 1884 the home of time. I’d decided to emphasize the new relationship between Scotland and England by starting my walk at the Calton Hill Observatory, home of Edinburgh time. Up until Greenwich won the battle as official time-keeper, local time prevailed in Scotland. And Edinburgh was 12 minutes different to London. How exciting a concept!
I had asked the Ordnance Survey to plot me a straight-line route from Edinburgh to Greenwich, and now rolled up in a giant cardboard tube in my hotel room was a set of large-scale maps of England and Scotland, with a black line drawn right across them. Interpreting this line and deciding how closely to stick to it was going to be one of the challenges of this walk.
For the purposes of the television series, I walked out of Waverley Station and up the steps into Waterloo Place. Like all filming, the first day is a bit like re-inventing the wheel. I seemed to have to go up the same set of steps about six times, while they shot enough footage to recreate the 39 steps. At this rate, I’d never get to Greenwich by Christmas.
‘I’m not walking anything else twice,’ I bawled, oblivious to the stares of commuters arriving for work. We’d only been filming an hour, and I’d covered only 300 yards and already lost my rag. It didn’t bode well.
I walked east up Waterloo Place and then took a steep tarmacked path up Calton Hill towards the Observatory. These gardens with their fine wrought-iron railings and neo-classical stone buildings, were unlocked at night, and so were a dossing-down spot for dozens of hippies, junkies and festival hangers-on without a room. Rubbish was everywhere you looked: bins overflowing and grass littered with beer cans, plastic supermarket bags and polystyrene food containers. It was a rather inauspicious beginning to my walk.
I went through a gateway and met Graham Rule, the secretary of the Astronomical Society which runs the Observatory entirely on donations. Graham was in a lather about his unwanted overnight guests, and he and some fellow astronomers had already done a tour round the outside of their building picking up the droppings of festival folk. He had ginger hair and specs, and a suitably oblique way of explaining time and longitude. Star-gazing is very popular here, and his society has over 100 members, one of the largest of its kind in Britain. In the main room, there was an interesting display of photographs of the Northern Lights, and a pathetically subtle sign asking for donations. There was no admission fee, a condition of the city council giving them the building.
As we climbed the narrow wooden steps up to the dome and the big telescope, Graham explained how before accurate clocks were invented, every important town needed an observatory because star-gazing was the only accurate way of measuring longitude, and therefore time. Longitude, said Graham, was an unnatural non-parallel line (unlike latitude) going through both poles, North and South. The distance between latitude is constant, but longitude depends on where you are. The difference of your angle to the sun sets your time, so Edinburgh and London were 3 degrees different, which worked out at 12 minutes.
I was totally confused. But Graham had become addicted to all this stuff as a small boy watching the Apollo landings, and explained that the 12-minute difference disappeared when a ‘mean’ (or average) time was introduced. I asked him how hard it would be to set my course to Greenwich. ‘Greenwich is roughly 25 degrees to the east, or left, of the due south line,’ he replied. ‘Unfortunately the compass is five degrees out because the magnetic North Pole isn’t exactly where the North Pole is.’ Never ask a boffin a simple question!
At least I could look through the telescope. But when I did everything was upside down. All I could see was the rocky outline of Arthur’s Seat, and in front of it, Salisbury Crags. These tremendous protuberances were sitting in Holyrood Park, bang slap on my route. The trouble was that there were several high-rise council blocks between Calton Hill and Salisbury Crags. The dynamics of Edinburgh are unique in Europe with the castle atop one crag, with sheer drops and steep hills all around, and Arthur’s Seat forming a green mass on the skyline, a counterpoint to the castle, right in the heart of the city. ‘I’d suggest walking round it rather than over it,’ was Graham’s last advice.
I said goodbye, and stepping around the hordes of tourists, I dropped down the hill and took Jacob’s Ladder, a set of steps down the side of St Andrew’s House. Inside the forecourt I could see the flattened grey outline of a man lying on the ground. Was it an artwork or the body of a rambler attempting the same route? I would never know. I crossed under the railway line leading into Waverley Station (where I’d started) and up Old Tolbooth Road to Canongate, on the Royal Mile. In 1724, Daniel Defoe thought this ‘the largest, longest and the finest street for buildings and number of inhabitants not in Britain only but in the world’.
He obviously hadn’t visited it at the height of festival madness. The pavements were chock-full of tourists, backpackers, rucksack wearers, performance artists and, worst of all, clowns, not to mention the people thrusting flyers into your hands every ten feet, begging you to attend their shows. A zoo would seem calm compared to this. It was 10.30 am and Edinburgh was officially full.
The largest arts festival in the world was out of control in my book. How many drag acts can one city take? Please don’t write in and tell me. A million visitors would pass through over a three-week period and performances were happening 24 hours a day. But how much of it was any good? After a few beers, can anyone tell? Don’t worry, I’ll still be back next year, it’s addictive.
I’d arranged to meet comic and actor Alan Davies outside
a pub on Canongate. People were astonished when I ordered a mineral water. But I did have to climb all those crags... Alan sloped down the street, immediately recognizable, his tall frame topped with that trademark mop of twirly curls and a large smile. He handed me the leaflet for his show Urban Trauma, which I’d seen the night before. Two things confused me – why did the photo of him on it show a truly bizarre pose – he seemed to be about to pull a piece of chewing gum off his right foot. Or had he just stepped in a large piece of dog poo? And why was his face bright red? Alan was unforthcoming about the ‘comedy’ pose, but did allow, ‘I’ve got a bit of a sun tan.’ I thought he looked as if he had scarlet fever. As his show ran for only 14 nights, and had sold out in advance, the leaflet was redundant anyway.
As we walked along the street up the Royal Mile, Alan was spotted by locals at every step. According to him, though, everyone else was a tourist and the locals were well outnumbered. It was boiling hot, and I was already regretting the 8 am start. But what time did he have to get up when he was filming Jonathan Creek for BBC1? ‘I get picked up about six usually and leave my house which is in Islington, then I’ll be filming somewhere in Wiltshire.’ Quickly I stopped moaning.
I told Alan I was glad I’d decided to start my walk during the Festival, as I’d be able to combine it with seeing a few shows.
I’d gone along to his the night before and been surprised to see children in the audience. After all, it didn’t start till 9.15, and included plenty of references to Monica Lewinsky, oral sex and wanking. I suppose they know all about it anyway.
Alan decided to be my tour guide to the Royal Mile, a part of Edinburgh I’ve always tried to avoid. ‘The first Edinburgh show I did was at a venue up here. I was a student. Now the Royal Mile is a tourist haven just here, hence the Mexican restaurants. But just on the right up here, we can go down some steps and see the first venue performed at when I was a student. It was a musical version of Lysistra and I had a big false cock stuck on me.’
Was it a sell out? I asked. ‘Yeah, not as much a sell out as being a bank commercial,’ Alan replied, having just done a very lucrative TV commercial for Abbey National. How long ago was Alan’s debut? ‘It was 1986, I was 20 and I had to do singing and dancing. It was a bloody good way to get my life in showbiz started. Lysistra is a comedy about women depriving the men of sex so they’d stop having wars. So we have to run round halfway through the show, going, “Please have sex with us, we won’t fight any more.” But we did it in the style of Oklahoma!’ I was incredulous. ‘We were called a bawdy romp in my first-ever review, and that gave me the hump even then.’
Undeterred, Alan kept returning to Edinburgh, but without a strap-on papier-mâché cock! How many years had he played here? ‘I’ve been in about six or seven shows and come up about eight or nine times to visit.’
Since Alan started coming here the Festival has exploded and now it’s got almost 10,000 people performing, particularly comedy and stand-up. So why, as Alan is a big success, with a British Academy Award, a hit TV commercial and a successful comedy series, does he keep coming back to Edinburgh? Wasn’t he denying less successful, less well-known comedians a place to perform? Wasn’t the Fringe now just mainstream?
‘I know what you mean, and it’s true. One of my first-ever stand-up spots was in the Fringe Club in Edinburgh down around the corner, and I was greeted with total indifference. That was ten years ago. But I didn’t care because I really like doing it. And I still like doing stand-up comedy, so what am I supposed to do now, go to some sort of posh place where only famous people perform, like Glyndebourne?’
We turned off the Royal Mile down a dank alleyway and went down some steps to see the birthplace of Alan’s career. It was a church hall, and the audience had only had to pay two quid to get in, Alan assured me. It held about 60 people but their Oklahoma!-style Lysistra only attracted 15 or 20 people a performance. ‘There were about eight of us in the show and I think six of us stayed in one flat with two bedrooms. There were four boys in one room and two of them were going out with each other. But there was only one bed and we were there for a fortnight and they obviously wanted the bed, but me and my mate said, “Look, we’ve got to have a bed for one week at least.” So we had it for the first week.’ Did he get lucky? ‘No, I didn’t. Every time I met a girl, I would say I’m sorry but I’ve got two gay boys in my bed and they bicker over the duvet all night long.’
I went inside to investigate, while Alan loitered outside. At this precise moment a ghastly cacophony of drumming was underway, but we were handed a leaflet announcing that Arthur Smith’s live bed show would be on that evening. It had been performed with Paul Merton and Caroline Quentin in the West End, and now it was back on the Fringe again where it started. Alan had premièred his show in London too, so it was hardly Fringe material, was it? ‘I’ve done it in New Zealand as well,’ he said triumphantly. I think we can call that the Fringe, I allowed. ‘Anyway,’ he said, changing the subject, ‘this is where I was in 1986. I was rubbish.’
I asked Alan if he was a keen rambler. ‘Very verbally,’ he said. ‘I like walking my dad’s dog in Epping Forest. That’s where I grew up.’ We retraced our steps, passing an Amnesty shop window where a large poster announced the charity show Alan was doing that very night. We both agreed the window display was rather ruined by a tasteless picture of David Bowie.
Back on the Royal Mile I headed for Holyrood Road and Salisbury Crags, while Alan went off to rehearse his show.
I left the swirling mass of Canongate behind me, walked down an alleyway, and emerged on to a giant building site – Holyrood Road. Not only is the new parliament building under construction on the site of a former brewery, but new newspaper offices for the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday are going up too, as well as Edinburgh’s answer to the Millennium Dome, the Dynamic Earth project. I crossed the road and surveyed the large sign announcing the scheme, with an award of

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