THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL (AND NO FURTHER)

(On Friday, 23/8/2019, I went through to Edinburgh on the train, just to get away from the hoose for a while and soak up a brief taste of the capital during the multiple Festivals. I took a pen and pad and wrote down things from the start of the train journey until I got to the Book Festival, because that place is the death of creativity and I couldn’t go on. I felt my brain wilt like a drunken erection in just the general vicinity of the place. This is a stream of consciousness snapshot of some of my journey. I have included a few photays to break up the text, or your brain would break with the length of it)

12.15 p.m. train, Polmont to Haymarket. Central Belt green slideshows by, pylons and sheep and farms, as a dyed-blonde granny in her 50s in the next carriage WHEE-WHEES and WOOS to a small child in the seat opposite. High-pitched “OH IT’S THE TRAIN!” lovely granny cries. Buildings appear, Linlithgow oasis, “Any unchecked tickets please,” says-not-asks a smiling bespectacled conductress. Flash smile, show tickets, “Whichivir yin it is, not got my glasses on.” “The next station is Edinburgh Park,” says a sorta-posh bools-in-mooth Scottish female announcer voice, “This train is for Edinburgh Waverley.” Blue Scotrail seats, clean spacious nearly-empty carriage, makes a change from packed cattle car travel arrangements during Festival time in years gone by. Cool, sunshine-dappled, soft hiss of nearly-silent journey to the centre of the day. 12:24, green neonly-announces  the overhead destination tickertape. Rough-looking guy and his dyed-red-hair missus in their 30s facing me next seat over and down. He is wearing neon green gutties that make me smile as I imagine him cutting up some tennis balls and making them into serviceable Edinburgh-stomping shoes. Clusters of X’s in the Scotrail seat design, light blue dark blue grey, hot rail sparks frozen in time and fabric.

Airport proximity, service with a fake everyday smile. Roughcast and his bird are drinking Red Stripe, Jamaica’s finest, Jamaica racket on that stuff if you drink enough of it. “The next station is Edinburgh Haymarket,” bools-gub haughtily informs and threatens. Bee flying randomly round makes a blonde woman in her 40s run up the carriage in don’t-sting-me fear. Murrayfield to the right, “The next stop will be Haymarket,” away from the stingnest, whoop-de-doo. Haymarket changed a few years ago, more hi-tec and corporate and sterile now, lecky gates, no more fun fare avoiding. White woman early 30s, black baby with pink-n-white-painted face in front-facing papoose, both eating some hungry lunch. Discarded Metros, broken hearts, times of joy, long-time electric-touch reunions. Sexy blonde business woman mid-30s hiheel clipclops by, distracted-phone-glancing. 

Some set ay tits on a tasty big woman I saw getting off the train, mountains of madness, a map in search of a reproductive territory, perky genetic landmarks to get lost in, hot dark chuckles. High glass vestibule ceiling, high gloss, foreign tourist faces, hop on hop off, violent tram clang. Stickers on a groaning lamppost outside promise nothing but complete capitalist escape, violent entertainment, fiddling while Edinburgh burns. Plastic-brick-built Oor Wullie, charity-cackling astride his therapeutic bucket. Streets are crowded with wheeled suitcases taking up pavement space. Every fucker here’s a tourist, including me. Dodgily cross roads against the lights, fuck it. Time for a Greggs pitstop, can of Coke and two ever-price-increasing sausage rolls, the Hell with Edinburgh Festival prices on anything else. Spot woman behind me in the queue is wearing a Cramond Island of Punk red teeshirt, late 80s reminisce, a pogo of words aboot the island and Oi Polloi and generators brought from the mainland to fuel sonic bunker bashes, and apparently it’s still the same, had one last week, dammit, missed it, oh well always next year maybe. 

                                        

Step out, walk along the street, young woman in short tight skirt midriff exposed showing part of a lower back floral tat, she looks like a Latino gangbanger, tough, take no shit, kick the cock off you. She triggers Chicago basement punk show flashbacks as I walk along behind her, kicked out of that one punkhouse drunk, getting wasteder out the back smoking weed with the singer of some Latino punk band who was a big Dead Kennedys fan. Different times, alien far-off climes. 

Stop on a bench by a statue of some regal-looking cunts, idly watching shoals of domesticated fuck-knows-where tourists swim by. Some teens who look and sound South American walk by, one in a Kreator teeshirt, can’t remember where they came from, Brazil maybe, the burning lungs of the emergency-screaming planet, maybe not Brazil, that was cunts like Brujeria, brutal death metal of years gone by, satire names, My Dying Bride, fuck it. Middle-aged and still noticing musical tribal affiliations and plumage and markings. Smiling.

Pink Oor Wullie on his plastic bucket over there laughs uproariously too. Bee at face, wave it off, “Fuck.” A sea of backpackers stretch as far as the tourist-educated eye can see. Wee scruffy black-clad matted-hair junkie woman walks by screaming out loud something that sounds like somebody’s name at nobody in particular. Don’t slitter and throw away my litter. Goodbye Atholl Crescent, Shandwick Place transition, the flat excitement mounts. Laughing heavily pregnant woman outside The Grosvenor with a grey “GET ME OUTTA HERE!” teeshirt. Headspinner mix of smells of weed, perfume, exhaust fumes, coffee. Always journey-marking tramclangs. 

Buses, bikes, taxis, pedestrians, tested-to-destruction theories of perpetual motion. Rutland Place, Princes Street, dodge the phone zombies as ever, fuck the tourists. Comfortably numb middle classholes from round the world, seeing it all and nothing, snapping and filming and instantly forgetting. West End building site, smell of wood and modernising from the scaffolding tunnel at the front. WHOOOZIPPP! Police siren warning fuck ootay the way. Up off Princes Street: impatient horns honking, foreign tongues chattering, engines idling, radios car-window-blaring. And then the Book Festival. 

Fake grass at the entrance, impeccably groomed neuter circus, this is the enemy, this is the enema, why did I come through here, must be 2002 when I was last here, nicking books and selling them for beer during unemployed Festival time, wandering constantly through international fields of nothing. There is not one single person here I would want to talk to or see read, fuck it, 

Nothing to see here,
move along, move
along forever.

14:00
END

(PS: I looked up Kreator and Brujeria, to see where they’re from. Kreator are German, so I was close geographically when I said Brazil. Brujeria are Mexican, not Brazilian. I apologise to any Mexican or Brazilian death metal fans I may have offended with my North-vs-South-America illiteracy. Scottish schools need better death metal location education)

(PPS: I know Swing Ding Amigos are from Nogales, Arizona, so they’re American, but they’re singing in Spanish, that’s close enough, and I like the song and…eh...ah, fuck it)