Having drunk too much red wine, I try to teach my mother to moonwalk, since Marcus Brigstocke is doing the same for John Humphreys on the TV.
Ed Hollis
Ed Hollis spends a week shepherding 45 students around Edinburgh, catching up with an old friend in a gay sex dungeon, and attending High Mass on Sunday.
Friday
"You're a real writer now, I can tell," says my agent, "you've started googling yourself." And so I have. With a vengeance. The day begins with me lying in bed and googling myself, and it ends just now, as I do the same. Did I mention I'd done it about fifteen times in between?
I awake this morning to find myself - or, let's be frank, my book, the Secret Lives of Buildings on the long list for the Guardian First Book Awards. I could pretend that such things don't matter; but actually I'm beside myself, and I know I'll be googling myself and consulting online horoscopes until the day the shortlist is announced, vainly scouring the web for runes and signs. ''Allow others to rant until they run out of steam,'' Shelley Von Strunckel advises today. I vow to do just as she says, though I'm still not quite sure why. I'm the one that's going on and on. About myself.
I'm a lecturer in an art college, and my boss breaks out the white wine at our examination board this afternoon when he hears my news. Slightly tipsy, we review the marks of the summer resits. I have one student to deal with who failed her second year because she missed most of the summer term -with rumour has it, a fake tan allergy. I'm tempted to award her a pass just for that.
My mother is up in Edinburgh, and on the way home from work we descend into some subterranean fringe dive to see Sarah Louise Young as La Poule Plombé - 'the frumpy pigeon' as she bitterly spits out the translation. It's a cabaret masterpiece. Holding a knife to her throat she sings about the unequal exchange between French and English:
We gave you savoir faire,
We gave you debonair:
You gave us flip flop.
You have us jogging.
Then we come home, and having drunk too much red wine, I try to teach my mother to moonwalk, since Marcus Brigstocke is doing the same for John Humphreys on the TV.
Is this literary enough?
Saturday
I'm watching Big Brother for the first time this year. I've held off until now. I can never be bothered to watch until there are only six people or so left, and the whole charade has calmed down a bit, becoming a little more Tarkovsky than Luhrmann.
I need this sort of Big Mac for the brain right now. It has been a big day, composed mostly of anxious anticipation. This evening I kicked off a design workshop for 45 students from Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Istanbul, India, and, of course, Edinburgh. It's been several years in the preparation and I've been rehearsing the roles of guru, travel agent and entrepreneur in the process, few of which sit easily with me. I've had to organize accommodation and food, and every moment of the students' time - and of their professors' - from the moment they step off the plane today until the 12th September, when they go home. I've organized cultural events before, and I know that one generally spends most of the time worrying about sandwiches and janitors, rather than Michelangelo and Debord. I spend most of the day longing for a drink.
Then they all turn up, and I remember why I love being a lecturer in an Art College. We greet the students with a drink at the 'C' venue. It's been cobbled together amid the ruins of a city block that was devastated by a fire ten years ago, and is now inhabited by a beer tent, a giant chess set, a colossal inflatable beer bottle, ten theatres, and a pink bus, brought up here on the spur of the moment by the students of Reading Art College.
Then we send them all off into the last 36 hours of the Edinburgh Fringe with the command to see as much as of it as they can before it evaporates. By Tuesday, the Old Town will be in a state of catatonic hangover. Right now, it is rocking. Off the students go into the night, seeking out free stand-up and pornographic cabaret.
And, relieved, I mooch home for a bit more Big Brother.
Sunday
I'd intended to be in bed by ten last night, but it didn't happen. Instead I slipped out again to see Jonathan Mayor, an old friend from university, do stand-up in some weird venue up fifteen flights of stairs. Afterwards, we catch up over a pint of foaming ale in Edinburgh's only public gay sex dungeon. Helpful leaflets at the bar offer 'support and advice to those without the gear or the confidence to get it on in public.' My friend and I have neither, and instead we sit on a leatherette banquette and talk about old times, as I gaze, tireder and tireder at the artex on the walls.
And so, a couple of hours later, to church. As we process in our scarlet chasubles, singing 'O Worship the Lord in the Beauty Of Holiness', I vaguely recall telling the students that High Mass at St Michael and All Saints is a free Fringe show of sorts. It was a drunken aside, so imagine my surprise when an Egyptian princess, two Finns, and three Indian girls march into the pews.
As the early Renaissance polyphony weaves its cages of sound, and the flames flicker through the incense, I try to imagine what they must be seeing - pretty much what I would see, I imagine, if I was shown puja in some temple in Tamil Nadu. It never fails to pique me - in a good way - the closeness between high Anglo-Catholicism and Hinduism: smells, bells, polytheism, the whole sense of colourful theatre. They say that when Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut in the fifteenth century, he thought he'd arrived in a Catholic country, so brightly painted were the idols. I wonder if the British made the same connection in the height of their imperial Anglican summer, as they chanted evensong in the cathedrals and parish churches of Allahabad and Gobalpur on Sea.
No book news today - not, of course, that that stops me from googling myself every five minutes on the iPhone.
Monday
The workshop kicks off for real this morning. I watch the students - and their visiting professors - go through a mixture of shock and recognition as I enunciate what I'm asking them to do. It's very simple. I want the students to divide into groups to design an interior in the Cowgate, the street on which they are staying, which is, for most of the year, a grimy slum, the scene of binge Bacardi Breezer boozing, stag and hen nights, and endless shouting and fighting. For a few weeks in the summer, the Cowgate is the heart of the Fringe, but that period has just come to an end.
This interior can be what, or where the students like, so long as it responds to one simple condition: each group has to design a space that will last for five units of time: 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, 5 decades, five centuries, five millennia.
We usually think Interiors and Architecture are about space; but they are in actual fact about time. A firework show is a 5 second world, a theatre set a five week environment, a shop or a bar a five year space, a school lasts for about five decades, a cathedral for five centuries - and the five thousand year building - who knows?
We round off the day with a visit to the vaults under South Bridge, an extraordinary warren of caves that, in their 250 year history have been factories, slums, brothels, bomb shelters, a hellfire club and so on. They weren't built to be anything at all - just the infrastructure that supported the road south out of the city; and because all they were was infrastructure, they never belonged to anyone. In the nineteen nineties they became the scene of an almighty land grab, a late twentieth century urban Oklahoma. Property owners around South Bridge tried the spare key they'd never tried, in the door they'd never opened, and found themselves the first that ever burst into a silent subterranean sea, free for the asking. Twenty years of colonisation later, the vaults have been infested by ghost tours, nights clubs, cabaret venues, and a 'sauna'. It's a wonderful example of a building that's run completely out of control.
Tuesday
We kick off the morning with a little of what we in the art college trade call 'studio cruising' - wandering from group to group, asking them how it's going.
Not far, as far as we can tell. The 5000 year group are staring blankly at one another, and don't seem to be generating anything other than a sullen silence. I confiscate their sketchbooks, forcing them to write down any thoughts they have on a communal sheet of paper. In five thousand years, I tell them, I want that piece of paper to be full. To be fair, they are faced with a monumental problem: 5000 years is an ahistorical length of time. 5000 years ago writing scarcely existed, and our only memories of that time are mythical, embodied in gnomic shards of pottery and stumps of brick ziggurat: Mohenjo Daro and Catahayuk don't really leave one a lot to go on.
The other spans of time - 500 years, 5 years, fifty years, and so on, are all imaginable, and recorded. We look around the room we are sitting in and estimate the duration of each element. The concrete column will be there for fifty years before it cracks, the glass window next to it will shatter in 25 years, perhaps; the light hanging from the ceiling will need to be replaced in 5, and so on. The castle outside the window has been there for five hundred years or so, and will probably be there in another five hundred.
We encounter the five second duration in the evening, as we walk around the Cowgate. I look up the street and see a strange sort of mist or smoke obscuring the end of the street. Five seconds later, we are drenched a downpour of tropical intensity and splendour. And then it passes, washing the last detritus of the festival away with it.
I call up the Guardian to see if they liked the article I've written for the coming Saturday review. The call is short: yes, great, super, bye. That's journalistic efficiency for you - they don't waste time. Coming from the glacially slow world of academia, it's all little terrifying.
Wednesday
This morning the students present their research about the site. They have all been given a seventeenth century map of Edinburgh, upon which they have inscribed and scrawled a present that the urchins and the merchants, and the Presbyterian divines of that time could never have imagined.
The students' observations and experiments are fascinating. The five second group spend their time speculating how long five seconds feels - until we tell them to stop speculating and to ask people: all fifty of us time five seconds sitting down, five seconds standing up, and five seconds standing on one leg to see how long it feels. Very scientific.
The five minute people spent the day walking round the Cowgate asking people if they have five minutes - but not saying what for. During the day 70% of their respondents say no - at night it is only 50%. Next they stick up posters on the street and ask people what they would do in five minutes. Most answers, mainly sexual, seem wildly optimistic to me. The five hours group collect the detritus of the night before: cans, bottles clothes, and even stones which all, unaccountably smell of cigarette smoke. The longer durations of time struggle with lifetimes, and generations, monuments, and ruins.
I'm really enjoying this week of intense teaching - the brown corduroy mantle of authorship seems a long way off as I hump gigantic sheets of cardboard from studio to studio, and do battle with students' preconceptions - concerned only, of course, to replace them with mine own.
We conclude the day in a pub working out which nationalities in Europe hate one another the most - a surprisingly effective way, we discover, to generate international love and brotherhood.
Thursday
Today the students start coming up with design ideas that range from arranging a five second eclipse to the driving of thousands of cows into the Cowgate for five hours. Five weeks propose turning the grotty street into paradise by giving its inhabitants their hearts desire, in order to see what they make of it. It will have become a hell in month, they predict. The five months propose a rainstorm that lasts as long as their allotted span, flooding the valley, turning its buildings into the palazzo, its alleys into the canals of an inadvertent Venice. The longer periods of time are having problems: these are students of interior design, and, perhaps, they are not as attuned to centuries, monuments, and permanence, let alone eternity, as they are to the more ephemeral compass of their discipline.
The day is concluded with a talk by Tim Taylor, who works as an architect by day, and by night as an artist. He shows us a wonderful variety of ephemeral work: cubes of ice eroded by domestic appliances: an iron, the steam from a kettle, the hot air from a hairdryer. There is a beautiful mountain of salt rising from a plain of carpet drenched in red wine: as time progresses, the red wine soaks its way up the slopes, leaving only a white peak, a pure snow cap that will eventually disappear. It's beautiful stuff, and I hope the students make the connection with their project.
But that's nearly enough. Sick of the sight of them, and of thoughts of time, space, and architecture, I come home and sit with a glass of white wine to watch What Katie Did Next.
Friday
It's the last day of the first week of the workshop. We've asked each group of students to make a film, five minutes, long. They've never made films before, and they don't know how to, and the films they do make are cobbled together in all sorts of strange and wonderful ways, ranging from PowerPoint presentations to snatches of mobile phone footage; a cloud of balloons released into the room, to simple sketches animated by a spoken story.
And the stories the films tell are wonderful too. The five thousand year group imagine the archaeologists of the future excavating a Cowgate that has been buried by geological processes for millennia. The task they have set themselves is to leave a message for those future historians - a Rosetta stone, a Lascaux - that they, in a world that we cannot even imagine, will understand.
The five day people propose replacing the shop windows that line the street with video screens that show the street itself - delayed by twelve hours. Clubbers will watch themselves walking to work on a rainy Monday morning, while commuters will see themselves wearing little else than deelyboppers and skyscraper heels, screaming their heads off, with a bottle of WKD in hand.
The five year group propose the planting of allotments in the empty building sites, to be used for food until such time as something is built on them. Floods and stampedes, street parties and sounds installations, revolution and monuments are proposed, and the Cowgate is transformed into multiple Calvino-esque invisible cities, Borgesian labyrinths, Barthesian mythologies.
We round the week off with an evening of Scottish cliché, starting with a short course in Scottish cuisine. The hostel where the students are staying contains a tiny communal kitchen, which we fill with forty five students peeling turnips and chopping potatoes. The students quickly learn that cuisine Ecossaise - or, at least, haggis, neeps, and tatties, is a case of boil in the bag; and within ten minutes or so the kitchen has become, as our Turkish guests point out, a steaming, flatulent hamam. When the feast is ready, Willie, my colleague, addresses the haggis in a terrifying, powerful Scots, and stabs the noble sausage with a glittering knife.
Then we all trip off to a ceilidh. The aggressive, repetitive dancing, curiously, rather than the boozing, sends the students slightly wild. They leave the hall at midnight, dripping in sweat, and hollering at the top of their voices. They descend into the Cowgate to join the stag parties they now resemble. In one week, they have become the creatures of their environment.
Enough about them. I run home to Google myself in the Saturday papers.
..............................................................................................................................................
Ed Hollis is an architect and designer living and working in Edinburgh. The Secret Lives of Buildings has been nominated for a Guardian First Book Award, and is published this month by Portobello Books.
...............................................................................................................................................
Monday, 7 September, 2009
In My week
Newsletter
Untitled Books
Your account
Register for an account and review books, comment on articles and build a list of your favourite reviews. Coming soon.
