Dan from Potted Panto with McNaughton Family Reviewers

Our 2edinburgh blog is designed to give a flavour for things to do and places to go when visiting Craigwell Cottage, our little city centre cottage (with parking) right in the heart of the city of Edinburgh.

We occasionally review special events and happenings in Edinburgh, but as a family we’re not able to cover a vast range of different types of event, preferring to focus on little news items about permanent attractions or events which are annual occurrences in the Edinburgh calendar.

This year, our family was given the opportunity to undertake a very special assignment – that of guest reviewers at some Festival Fringe performances on behalf of the review site Edinburgh Spotlight. We were very excited to be asked, and as soon as the Fringe Programme was issued we pored over it working out and planning which shows we would ask to review, and fitting reviews in as best we could with other holiday activities we had planned.

As first time reviewers we really had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for, but the owners of Edinburgh Spotlight were very helpful and patient with us, explaining what would be required. We also opted to go to some shows simply as ‘the audience’ so that we could relax and enjoy them without having to exercise our critical faculties.

Our first reviews of CBBC’s Dan and Jeff in Potted Panto, and the West End Glee Club have now been published, and you can find our other reviews by following the links below We hope you enjoy sharing our experiences.

Dr Bunhead is Volcano Head

Azincourt performed by Willington School

James Campbell’s Comedy and Song for Kids

Things that go…bump, rattle, klunk, cackle, woo!

Water Babies – Stage Stars Young Actors Company

Fabulous Female A-Capella – In the Pink

Dandelion’s Story – Modl Theatre

Shipwrecked – The Amazing Tale of Louis de Rougemont as told by Himself

Time-Tastical Productions – Dr Austin and Sparks in Space

Indefinite Articles – Pinocchio

Still a couple more reviews to come – thanks Edinburgh Spotlight for this opportunity to experience so much of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2010.

Wrap up warm!

Edinburgh Castle survived by being a difficult place to attack, and that means few ways in! On the night of the Tattoo, the only access route is via the upper section of the Royal Mile: Castlehill. To get there you will approach on foot either via Lawnmarket or Johnston Terrace. Organised tour buses will probably drop their passengers in the vicinity of Chambers Street and you’ll walk via George IV Bridge and then into the Lawnmarket.

If you’re coming by car, our recommendation would be to park at the Kings Stables Road/Castle Terrace car park (see map). Time your arrival to get there after the daily shopping traffic has left, but before it gets filled by Tattoo visitors – and make sure you have a debit/credit card or a large supply of change (at least £10), for even in the evening this car park is expensive. The chances of getting a free parking space in any streets within reasonable walking distance is slim.

The Tattoo takes place in the late evening and although it is August it will be COLD up there – to accommodate the huge crowds which flock there every year, giant stands are erected on three sides of the Castle Esplanade. These stands are high up above the city and even a slight breeze will mean a chilly night as it gets dark and the temperature dips. Remember also that you will be sitting still in a small space, so you won’t be able to move about much to keep warm.

This means layers: lots of lovely layers of clothing. It may be August, but dress all the family as if you are going out to play in the snow. This means hats, scarves and gloves too. A good thick pair of socks and stout walking shoes or trainers (sneakers) will be appropriate footwear. I’ve seen people come here with summer sandals and flip flops – their feet must be blue by the time the show ends. And remember, the Castlehill is cobbled and you will have lots of stairs to climb in the stands so no high heels!

We also find that taking a travelling rug each is a bonus. You can wrap it round your knees and then wear it shawl-like over your shoulders on the way home for added warmth. When our son was small, it was also useful for wrapping him up in to carry a sleeping bundle back to the car.

I’m the niece of a man who wore a wet suit under his clothing one year when attending the Tattoo. I’m not advocating that, but if the forecast is for rain, don’t forget that the Edinburgh Military Tattoo has never been cancelled because of the weather – the show will go on!

Hope this is helpful for visitors planning a visit to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Next time you come, stay a little longer – maybe at the lovely Craigwell Cottage from which you can walk to the Tattoo! And here’s some more if you’re thinking of attending Edinburgh Festival Fringe events.

If you have more helpful hints – add them to the comments.

Massed bands on Castle Esplanade

Came across this little publication by Kerry Nelson

Kerry Nelson's Pocket Guide to Edinburgh Walks

Well, certainly failing in the target for reading, but things like the Moonwalk and other pleasures have been getting in the way.

I’ve brought the weighty tome along with me on holiday and have been undertaking to get back on track with my reading. You may have gathered by now that I’m no great shakes on this history lark. Just couldn’t summon any great enthusiasm, preferring fictionalised accounts rather than lists of facts.

Must say that my reading of Chapters 9 onwards have felt like torture – book falling on my nose as I drop off after ploughing through a few paragraphs and so on.

But, having slogged up to the Battle of Bannockburn over my muesli the other morning (yes, I’m such fun on holiday!), I’m finding a little more of the story resonating. As soon as we got to James I and the building of Linlithgow Palace I began to get interested. Reading is of course a personal journey, and I think that I’ll have difficulty in recalling many facts of battles won and lost and parts of the countryside traversed. But I can relate to a king who wanted to build a palace and decorate it in the grandest style of the times. And I liked the tale of how he fell in love with a lady and wrote poetry.

It also seemed that the history as portrayed in this book is a timeline moving from one ruler to the next, one battle to the next in a weary procession. Surely this isn’t the way to interest a non-historian like me? I’d thought at the beginning of the book that I’d be hooked by the sense of place which was being conveyed, and now I find that all these endless battles just don’t do it for me. No idea of how the ‘common people’ lived from day to day – how was it to be a citizen of this emerging nation?

Am I hopelessly lost in my need for domestic details rather than the ‘hanging, drawing and quartering’ of the would-be leaders of men?

This is it, girls [and boys in bras], the night we’ve been training for. Edinburgh hosts the 2010 MoonWalk event this evening, raising money for a very good cause.

Saw the tented village in Inverleith Park yesterday.  No doubt a hive of activity this afternoon.  Have the kit all laid out. Costumes will hopefully cover a multitude of sins – hopefully flying the flag is still ok even if it is supposed to be a Mardi Gras theme – Scotch Pancakes anyone?

Weather forecast looks good, and it looks like it will be a settled night, so I’m really looking forward to it, but just a teeny bit nervous, and not coping well with sitting about waiting!

Festival Theatre

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is now firmly established in the calendar as taking place in mid-June each year. Films are screened in many venues throughout the city, with the focus being on The Filmhouse, but this year the Edinburgh Festival Theatre was the venue for the opening event. A red carpet event earlier in the evening set the scene, but for the general public, the first event of the 2010 Festival was a screening of The Illusionist, an animation directed by Sylvain Chomet.

I had read a preview of the movie, and as the centre piece of the movie is the City of Edinburgh itself, I was eager to go along to see how my home city had been depicted.

I shall leave film critics and reviewers to the technical details and simply say that I loved it. I shall want to see it many times over to catch little details I have missed, and I’m sure that the stills from the film will become popular motifs gracing postcards of the city and used to advertise Scotland as a destination. That sounds like I am belittling them, and this is not the case – they are rich in detail and beautifully drawn, but the nature of animation lends itself to use in that way. I shall buy the DVD as soon as it is released and put it in Craigwell Cottage for my guests.

The Illusionist

This evening as I returned home after the event, I was seeing Edinburgh through different eyes, and I thank M. Chomet for opening up new vistas for me. I wonder when the big curly lampposts disappeared from Princes Street? I caught glimpses of them in the movie and was transported to the Edinburgh of my childhood.  It even made me nostalgic for the Jenners of old – in the days when it was an independent Edinburgh institution.

If you’re thinking about attending the Edinburgh International Film Festival in future years, be sure to take a look at Craigwell Cottage to see if we might suit your requirements for accommodation. We’re within walking distance of The Festival Theatre, and at the opposite end of the city centre from The Filmhouse.

One of the popular activities for guests who stay at Craigwell Cottage is to take a walk round Arthur’s Seat in Holyrood Park.

I’ve mapped out a route for you so that you can decide if you want to add it to your list of activities while you’re staying here. Or if you head for the Scottish Parliament at the end of the Royal Mile, then you can pick up the route from there no matter where you’re staying!

The route is just under 4 miles, and it is quite steep at the start, but you will want to take frequent stops to allow for taking photographs and maybe making little videos, so allow a couple of hours. There are no restrooms on the route, and no shops, so if it is a hot day it would be advisable to take a bottle of water with you and make sure you put on some sunscreen. A good stout pair of walking shoes or trainers (sneakers) should suffice, and after the first mile or so the route follows a tarmac pavement. The ‘off road’ part of the walk is along a rough track which is wide enough for 3 people to walk side by side, but do take care as the ground falls away very steeply beside the path, so don’t get too close to the edge.

To pick up the path in front of Salisbury Crags, keep the Scottish Parliament building to your right, but stay on that side of the road, crossing Queen’s Drive and turning left along the side of the cycle track on the south side of Queen’s Drive. You should see a short flight of steps leading up to the track – turn right there and start your climb. Follow the track until you descend to Queen’s Drive, then follow it round the south side of Arthur’s Seat, passing Duddingston Loch and Dunsapie Loch and then descending to pass St Margaret’s Loch and returning to your starting point near Holyrood Palace.

There are many opportunities for photography, and if you’ve timed your walk to finish in time for “elevenses” or afternoon tea, then we’d be happy to recommend a visit to Foodies at Holyrood, Clarinda’s Tearoom or the Queen’s Gallery Cafe.

Launch day 2010

I must confess to having had ‘Fringe Fatigue’ last year (sorry!), and having spent a week of August out of Edinburgh just to escape the hustle and bustle, and because it was a ‘last summer’ for a chapter of our family’s life story (but that’s an entirely different tale).

June 12th saw the launch of the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme, and my enthusiasm has returned. In all the rushing about I was doing, I had a moment of quiet reflection about what the Fringe has meant to me over the years, and indeed how I was originally introduced to it by my Dad.

When we were children, Dad worked in a building society and was busy during August with things that building societies did (honest, trustworthy institutions that they were back in the ‘friendly society’ days). But he took time out to take us to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. A very exciting experience for young children who were used to being tucked up in bed by 8 o’clock. The Edinburgh Military Tattoo was our first experience of outdoor events, spectacle, massed Pipe Bands and usually a scary centrepiece involving gun fire or speeding motor bikes. No matter that we had to be huddled under blankets and even carried back home sleepily afterwards – we’d had great fun, been thrilled and in awe, and even cried when the Lone Piper made us feel what it was to be Scottish.

Edinburgh Military Tattoo

Later, as we grew up, Dad would be involved in organising some special days out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for us. He loved the challenge of organising a day where we would start at 11.00 am and finish at 11.00 pm and have managed to cram in samples of many different types of entertainment in a day – he’d only have a whole day off every second Saturday, so it was really important to make the most of the day. So we’d start at a children’s show, have lunch with a cabaret or musical event going on round about, take in an exhibition or two if the schedule allowed, see a serious theatre piece in the afternoon, find time for tea somewhere swanky, or unusual, and then off to a Footlights performance or a revue type show and something more risqué in the late evening. We usually managed to cram in around 6 performances in the course of one of these days, and over the years we found our favourites. We’d always have ‘Instant Sunshine‘ (in the Miles Kington days) somewhere on the list, and either the Cambridge Footlights or Oxford Revue, a puppet show and the main exhibitions plus whatever The Scotsman reviews suggested was worth seeing. Was it easier to get tickets in those pre-information-revolution days?

After the rest of the family moved away from Edinburgh for various reasons, I stayed on and by this time was working and living in the city Centre. I’d loved the format of cramming so much into a day so much, that I started working it out for myself. Finding the weekends usually too busy, I’d take a weekday off in each of the three weeks of the Festival – with the bank holiday being a given, so only two more to take out of my annual leave. I continued the pattern of trying to fit around 6 shows in during a day, and of course doing it all ‘on foot’ as the centre of Edinburgh lends itself to that too. Having discovered the power of coloured marker pens and a big piece of paper for planning, I was in stationery heaven. As soon as I got my copy of the Programme, I’d pore over it, marking all the ‘would like to see’s’ and then adding them to a big list and working out how to fit in as many as I could. It seems on reflection that there were more ‘one week runs’ then, rather than shows being on for the duration, so you had to jiggle about sorting through the lists until you had something approaching a plan, and then of course you had to go to the ticket office in person, there being no ‘on-line’ ordering in those heady days.

So here I am in 2010, the Mum now. For the last few years I’ve been taking my own children to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. They’ve had that late night excitement, and we’ve had our turn going to the pre-school, pre-reading ‘baby’ entertainments. We’re also past the stage where one of the children is ‘too young’ and the other ‘too old’ for the majority of the children’s entertainments. And we’re also excited by the range of things we might experience – all on our doorstep, all within a short bus ride or walking distance. We’ve got our Edinburgh Festival Fringe enthusiasm back – hurray! And with the advent of the Excel Spreadsheet, and on-line ordering, we did lots of planning, sorting and ticket buying from the comfort of our home. We can’t wait for the magic to begin.

I am a keen reader.  Have been since I learned to read.  In recent years, I’ve been a member of two book groups as well, so not only do I read, I also meet with others to chat about what we’ve read together.

Increasingly I find myself drawn to read blogs and on-line content too, and have connected with a couple in particular over the past year or so.  Scotland for the Senses is one of them.  A place where you can read about a personal journey experiencing all manner of things Scottish.  Back in April 2010, there was a competition on this blog to win a copy of Magnus Magnusson’s ‘Scotland, The Story of a Nation’.  The trap was, you had to read it along with the giver to encourage her to keep going, and email back and forth to share comments on what was being read.

To win, you had to submit details of your favourite Scottish character, as well as agreeing to the conditions. ‘Ha, I never win anything’ I thought to myself, but I know who my favourite Scottish character has been for a while.  At least, she’s the Scottish character I’d like to understand more about.  This is where it gets personal.

For the Scottish character I speak of is my great-grandmother, one Roseann/Roseanna/Annie McGowan, born in around 1870 and mother of 12 children.  At one time in her life she lived very close to Craigwell Cottage, in a tenement flat at South Back of Canongate, Edinburgh.  A road which is now Holyrood Road, and a place where the Scottish Parliament now stands.

Before the birth of my first child, I devoted a couple of weeks to researching my family history in the Scottish Records Office at New Register House, and the one person I kept coming back to and wanting to know more about was my great-grandmother Annie.  I shall write more of her in future posts, but it was finding out more about her life that sparked that fire within me to start reading more about the past rather than the diet of novels upon which I’d mainly existed until now.  And somewhere in my personal journey there’s a connection to place which made the ownership of Craigwell Cottage more than a simple business decision.

So, tempted by the prospect of adding to my scant knowledge of Scottish History, I posted a quick comment and moved on, only to find out just a few days later that I’d won!  So now, not only was I struggling to finish books for my two ‘real’ book groups, but there I was committed to contributing in a public place too.  A scary prospect indeed.

When the brown paper parcel arrived I noticed from the sender’s address that she lived very close to me in Edinburgh, so it seemed sensible to invite her to meet up and discuss the practical arrangements.  A bit of baking and I was ready for the meet, thinking that if nothing came of it at least we’d both have had cake!

A lovely meeting and the outline of a plan resulted in the decision to post comments on Scotland for the Senses’ Facebook Discussion Board.  In the few short weeks since then, I’ve come to realise that this will be no easy task.  For we agreed to a target of around 60 – 70 pages a week, which by my reckoning means that we should be about half way through by now and I’m only on page 123.  This is truly becoming a struggle.

But like any activity on which you embark, there is learning to be had from it, but maybe not what I expected.  The next steps on the journey are the subject of the post The First 100 Pages.

Reading about History

I won the competition to read this book along with Scotland for the Senses, a fellow tweeter and enthusiast for Scottish experiences, whereas I’ve tended to concentrate my reading for the moment on Edinburgh where my home and business are based.

To put the reading of this book in context, I’d just finished reading Patricia Dennison’s Holyrood and Canongate a Thousand Years of  History and had picked up another couple of historical books in the Audio Books section of my local library – Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, and Phillippa Gregory’s A Constant Princess.  One of my reading groups has also embarked on reading Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, so I’ve got that ‘on the go’ at the moment too.

I thought that reading a history of Scotland would help put a timeline around my reading, providing context for dipping in and out of different periods of history.  But I’m learning a lot about different subjects as I read, and yesterday as I took some time out from reading to be mindful of another task in hand (or rather on foot!) at the moment, I had a revelation about why the first 100 pages of this book have taken so long to read.

I was slogging my way around the base of Arthur’s Seat, with my headphones playing the MP3 version of the aforementioned Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England when I realised what I wasn’t enjoying about Magnusson’s book.  In the introduction to the Time Traveller’s Guide, Ian Mortimer explains why he’s decided to write about history by taking you on a journey through time.   He points out that “understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge”.  Further that “seeing events as happening is crucial to a proper understanding of the past”.  And I was stopped in my tracks by his point that: “Most of all it needs to be said that the very best evidence for what it was like to be alive in the 14th century is an awareness of what it is like to be alive in any age, and that includes today. Our sole context for understanding all the historical data we might ever gather is our own life experience.”

The culmination of his introduction to the Time Traveller’s Guide is that “the key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive, but the means by whereby we may understand it is and always will be, ourselves.”  Thank you so much, Mr Mortimer, for providing me with that flash of insight.

Mortimer says: “As soon as you start to think of the past happening as opposed to ‘it having happened’, a new way of conceiving history becomes possible.”  He talks of an investigation into the sensations of being alive in a different time.  And while Magnusson’s book has conveyed to me a great sense of place with references to places in Scotland which you can visit today and what they’re like now, I’m struggling with how it feels to have lived in any of these past times.  And that’s what any recounting of a historical nature must have for me, a sense of what it was like to actually have lived in those times.

So, the reading of “Scotland The Story of a Nation” will be more of a journey than I thought, and take me in different directions and to different places.  All of which is a good thing, but won’t make for a speedy finish.