Festival

I carefully place one half of the sandwich in my mouth, the other half on top of the wrapper it came in...and that provides sufficient sail area for a gust of Scottish wind to blow the entire thing off the table and onto the well trodden floor of the Edinburgh Book Festival. I stare at the sandwich in disbelief. This, and things like it, cannot be happening to me. Yet they are, constantly, all the time. My wheelchair runs into the small bed in my room at Edinburgh University's halls of residence. I pee on my left foot trying to maneuver the Scottish capital's wheelchair-accessible toilets...and thanks to the EU directive, there are a surprising numbers of them now. And why it's always the left shoe, and the daily misadventures of dropping things and aiming badly, these matters are inexplicable and consistently galling and humiliating, and I'm fighting my way through this trip with a certain background level of grief and depression.  But I'm in the sandwich moment now, and all I care about is the loss of lunch.

Here, in the crush of writers, readers, publishers, agents and hangers on, what is on the floor of the Book Festival coffee bar does not bear consideration. Whatever was on the floor is now embedded in the sandwich. And I am hungry. I am also debased in ways that make me want to avoid further debasement, particularly in public. Do I eat the sandwich? What literary types are likely to see this happen? In an inattentive moment, an hour earlier, I almost ran my wheelchair footrests into the shins of Margaret Drabble, a famed British novelist. I survived that, and now there is the sandwich on the floor that must be dealt with.

Fortunately, I am in the company of Marlou's nephew Elliot. Eat it, he assures me, and don't worry about it. Things happen like this at festivals, he adds. Being a twentysomething, he is a veteran of music festivals, and to him a crowd is a crowd, and a food stand is a food stand, and all the events and Brownian motion that surround them...well, he has seen it all before. I eat the sandwich. No one is watching, of course. No one cares, of course, and it may be that the latter is most disconcerting. I am on my own. Not really, not with one Londoner and one sturdy Midwestern American. But I can feel on my own if I want to, despite the distractions of the world's biggest arts festival.

It is impossible to tell if my despairing mood colors the experience, or if in attending the Edinburgh Festival, I have almost bitten off more than I can chew...in the musculoskeletal sense. Still, something about this strange trip has worked extremely well. Both young men are considerate. They know I'm in a sad state and keep encouraging me. And they have their own worries. Elliot has never been away from home this long before, and Jake's tenure at the BBC having lapsed, faces a horrible job market. Everyone keeps trying. The Book Festival is just one tiny subset of this massive arts mania that engulfs Edinburgh during its Arts Festival. It occupies Charlotte Square, making it attractively small and contained. Great writers come and go at a dizzying pace. Most of the events are sold out, but one can pick up a return ticket here and there.

Elliot and I listened to the economics editors of the Guardian and of the Daily Mail, politically opposite newspapers, discuss the world economic crisis. They were in remarkable and startling agreement. Things are grim, will get worse and there's no real solution, and no real end, in sight. It's enough to make a man wolf down his sandwich, Edinburgh contaminants and all.

Getting around this city of cobblestones and hills doubtless would have posed an enjoyable challenge at another point in life. But I'm not at that point. I'm at a point when every spine-jarring cobblestone irritates me more than can be described. Everything irritates me, if I'm honest with myself. Fortunately, Edinburgh is full of cabs. And again, with a nod to the EU directive, those cabs are equipped with wheelchair ramps. So I have abandoned much overland getting about in favor of taxis. I have got two young guys to steer me in and out of them. It's all working very well.

And despite my gloom and furor, throwing taxi money at the problem gives me just enough energy to do what needs to be done. And what needs to be done involves going all over this city with its seven hills and stone pavements in search of performing arts events. Every theater is booked to the gills. And every square, park, court and open area either has a tent pitched on it for performances or an exhibition. Famous performers turn up in tiny venues. Jake wanted to see a standup comedian, Stewart Lee, who is frequently on BBC TV. So, what the hell? The basement venue was laughably inaccessible. Carry my 200 pound wheelchair down eight stone steps? The club was quite willing to do this. Instead, we chained the wheelchair to a wrought iron fence with a bike lock, courtesy of the stage manager. The two guys helped me down the steps and into a chair. I laughed intermittently during the show, the whole experience helped along by a small single malt. Which, of course, had me hobbling further underground in search of the tiny club's toilet. Wheelchair-accessible, believe it or not, even though the club clearly wasn't. Never mind, for I got there in time, saving myself from further humiliation.

And the next day, damned if all three of us weren't in Edinburgh's magnificent Usher Hall, home of the city's symphony. The orchestra was a French one, and the program mostly Mendelssohn. And Jake and Elliott gave it a go, just as I had done with their comedy club. And then we went on to the next day's Romanian production of Faust. Which deserves an entirely separate blog entry, and may or may not get one, depending on...where the sandwich falls.