43 and a bit years on.

This is the McEwan Hall in Edinburgh Univerdity.

It is where Edinburgh Univerdity graduations take place and I graduated here in the early summer of 1974.

I doubt if I have been in it more than a couple of times since but it has recently been beautifully extended and refurbished and today it was where the Scottish Government launched our new Brexit analysis paper . My extra photo shows the event which was held in one of the new basement meeting rooms.

The hall was also the scene of an infamous event during the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1963 when the great Ricky Demarco ( whom I have blipped) staged a coup de theatre when a naked woman was pushed in a trolley across the stage during a drama conference.

It caused a scandal in the douce and rigidly conventional city of that time but the commentator Bernard Levin thought in retrospect that the moment marked the start of what was later called the “permissive” society though many of us might prefer to call it merely a more open and tolerant one.