at remove

I had been vaguely planning to poke at a couple more earlyish Fringe things this morning before it all stops for another year but never quite got round to it and caught up with some reading instead. First booked-thing of the day was in the late afternoon at the bookfest which left some time for wandering about beforehand. The redesigned bench-seating bit at the east end of the Grassmarket has always been poised between infestation by tourists and jakeys, though this summer the tourists have seemed to have had the upper hand. Today there was a jakey sleeping in front of the bench which was packed with tourists. I vaguely wondered who got there first and if the tourists had either asked him to move so that they could sit down or even if they'd rolled him off the bench when he failed to respond.

Disappointing first bookfest-thing: sentences unfinished, points half-made, audience questions not anwsered and far too many empty yahs emitted. A pity there wasn't some sort of system in place whereby anyone leaving a talk before the ¾-way point is entitled to a partial rebate of the cost of the ticket or the option to exchange it for a bookfest bookshop voucher. On the plus side the big air-tube in the middle was functioning properly and I'd bagged a seat with a nice cold draught.

I had seventy minutes between the mic-problem late-finish event and the next in which to find something to eat and wander about for a bit before Nicky turned up after a day harvesting giant courgettes from her allotment. The bookfest cake-shop's emphasis is on cakey-stickiness rather than nutrition so I shopped outside and returned to eat whilst sitting on one of the grubby-looking plastic sofa things they have to use given the frequency of rain and the fact that anything with wooden legs would start to rot after a few days sitting in the marshy bog the central area quickly becomes. The evening event was reasonably interesting... Polly Toynbee, some beardy bloke from the Telegraph, an MP from the south and Richard Holloway as the chair discussing the disparity between the haves and haven'ts. Given that the audience was at the book festival in Edinburgh there was a high likelihood of the high proportion of codgers in the audience being posh codgers with the peculiar views such people tend to hold and there were indeed a few mutterings along the lines of "dreadful woman.. can't abide her" when Toynbee got up to speak about social imbalance at the start. Beardy Telegraph bloke brought up the topic of education so that he could ramble fractiously on about the 11+ system after which the MP guy spoke reasonably coherently but tangientially and evidently meaninglessly as I can't recall what he said. Lots of the questions returned to the education thing with a few of the sorts of viewpoint likely to be found in an event in which posh codgers predominate in a city with a relatively high proportion of fee-paying secondary pupils. There were a few people stuck on selection but most people seemed to have registered the point made earlier about the correlation between parental income and testable exam results.

Popped to a film on the way home. Well-shot but fairly dull content. Better will be about next week when the evenings will be free of festival-related stuff.