I’ve just finished three and a half weeks of walks as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016. It was a new experience for me, and an enjoyable one – walking in the city, meeting people on the walks, running into old friends and acquaintances on the High Street while handing out postcards, and getting to know the poems, and the places I’d matched them with, better. And I enjoyed the buzz of checking each morning to see how many tickets I’d sold for that day’s walk.
Highlights? The young couple from Rio, delighted the Olympics had shunted their winter holiday from July to August, which meant they could come to the Edinburgh Festival. Reading the poem ‘Intercession’, written twenty years ago about St Margaret’s Well in Holyrood Park, at the well, to the sound of its water falling. Getting my tongue around 16th century Scots, which turns out to sound less foreign than it looks. And not having to cope with any serious rain; drizzle, yes, but the heavy stuff, when it come, always fell an hour or two before or after the walk.
Thanks to everyone who came on the walks, all 150 of you. Thanks to Alice and Tamsin for the photographs here. And now I have the next five months to mull over whether I’ll do it all again next August.