Edinburgh Festival Diary Week Two: I was strolling down Nicolson Street on Monday afternoon when I noticed that Arthur's Seat was on fire. Thick black plumes of smoke rose from the 800ft landmark - a piece of highland scenery parked in the city centre close to the Scottish Parliament. Acting purely on instinct, I dashed headlong into the nearest internet café and did a quick google to find out what was going on.
An hour before the fire started, Mel Smith was photographed leaning out of a window at the Assembly Rooms, smoking a cigar. The veteran comedian and actor was making an angry, defiant gesture against the new Scottish smoking ban, which had just prevented his Churchill character from playing the cigar for real in the opening show of Allegiance.
I'm not for a moment suggesting a link between Mel's protest and the gorse fire an hour later. Police searched his dressing room thoroughly, and no catapults were found. I want to focus instead on the far more serious issue: censorship of artistic expression. "The ban would have delighted Churchill's arch enemy Adolf Hitler," fumed Mr Smith, and he was right.
(Mel, that is, not Adolf.)
The basic human right of the actor to smoke on stage is one of the burning moral issues that define our age, right up there with the invasion of Lebanon and Shane Lynch's farewell to Love Island. Mel Smith is right to stand up for historical accuracy, and the pursuit of realism in every detail. I salute his integrity and courage, qualities that will stand him in good stead as he prepares for his next big role, Kurt Cobain - the Final Hours.*
Glasgow only has an eight-lane motorway running through it to slow the pedestrian's progress. Edinburgh in August has the Royal Mile, with its heaving mass of street performers, tattoo tourists and flyer junkies. Not since stepping out of the airport taxi into the cauldron of downtown Delhi in 1986 have I come across such a wave of desperate begging - young people mostly, their eyes glistening with a terrifying mixture of missionary zeal and adolescent embarrassment: "Pleeease accept these free tickets for Shakespeare on Stilts, starting in 10 minutes. Pleease."
What is this awful addiction, I ask myself, that drives human beings to such lengths just to stand on a stage and be looked at. In the nick of time I remember I am a human being myself, on my way to do my seventh night of 24, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Every year people are forced to go further to invent an original publicity angle that will push their show to the front. In the street, the lines between stunt and reality become blurred; is that a real wedding party throwing confetti outside St Cuthbert's on Lothian Road, for example, or a thinly-disguised pitch for Confessions of a Paralysed Porn Star?
I came across a particularly elaborate ruse yesterday on the corner of Queen Street and Frederick. Two cars had been made to look as if they had bashed into each other at the junction, right in the middle of the morning rush hour for maximum attention.
The two "drivers" were squaring up to each other, and were giving an excellent impression of being on the point of coming to blows. I guessed it was an opera company of some sort, judging by the volume of their voices and the fat lady crying in the passenger seat, who was really giving it everything she had got. I went up and asked for a flyer, but they remained in character throughout, and told me in no uncertain terms where to go.
Even outside the city you're not entirely safe from the sales pitch. On a day-trip with some friends to the picturesque St Mary's Loch, a good 40 miles to the south, I was distracted from my packed lunch by some zany individual far out in the middle of the lake, shouting and gesticulating.
I was able to pigeon-hole him right away as stand-up comedian, from the wacky, wide-eyed expression, as seen on dozens of posters plastered around the Gilded Balloon. No doubt he had his 10,000 flyers concealed just beneath the surface of the water, ready to pounce. I just ignored him and he went away.
Being the biggest arts festival in the world, you'd think Edinburgh would rest easy on its laurels, but do I detect some unease under the surface, some seeds of decadence in the empire as other leaner, hungrier cities eye the castle walls? Manchester, Newcastle & Gateshead, Melbourne, Montreal, Singapore - they're all sharpening their teeth. Edinburgh already has the answer: the festival is staging 18 performances in Glasgow's west end this year. World domination is just around the corner.
* For one night only