Notes from the North 7 2025

 Less than two weeks ago I looked out from my sitting room window and saw plumes of thick smoke rising over Arthur’s Seat. After weeks of no rain the flames were rampaging across bone-dry gorse and grass. This was not the first time the hill has gone on fire but it jerked Edinburgh out of its usual complacency and reminded us all that Scotland, reputedly the land of rain, mist and lochs, does burn too.     

Flames and floods are what we are learning to expect everywhere, as the planet responds to centuries of human destruction and warfare.  

The Festival is in its last days. The crowds show no sign of thinning but the temperatures are lower and there is more than a hint of autumn in the bright red of the rowan berries and hips. Here at home I have emptied my potato bags, picked the last of my small crop of beans and peas and am now out along the back lanes getting blackberries to make bramble jelly. 

 

The theme of the Festival has been ‘The truth we seek’, through dance, theatre and music. There were Hub talks too. I only managed to get to the one on academic freedom where the comments and questions from the audience definitely suggested a tightening of control over  academic staff, trying to manage the competing demands of anxious, fee-paying students and the autocratic decisions of senior management, focussed on keeping their patrons and investors sweet. 

One of the speakers was Toufic Haddad, a Palestinian-American academic, currently embroiled in a court case in Israel to protect his own academic freedom. 

Truth is definitely under attack from almost every direction but there is also much to celebrate in the performances and shows that have filled halls and theatres since the start of August. Comedy reigns at the Fringe so there’s laughter too, despite prevailing pessimism about the state of the world and the absence of leadership and wise judgement everywhere. 

 

Out of all that I saw I want to mention three people and their work here. The first is Andy Goldsworthy, some of whose work is on show in the Royal Scottish Academy at the foot of the Mound. 

‘Andy Goldsworthy, Fifty Years’ is the title of the exhibition which will be open until 2^nd November. Goldsworthy has lived in Dumfriesshire for the past forty years but formed his first strong links with the land as a teenager working on farms near Lees in Yorkshire. The exhibition brochure says a recurrent theme in his work is that of ‘the interrelationship of humans and the working land’. That is certainly true but it is only part of what he does. He will observe and capture the changing look of a decaying tree, the pattern of leaves floating down a stream, the slow drip of a melting icicle and the puddle it forms on the ground beneath it. His work is often deliberately ephemeral, decisively unique to the moment and the place but capable of being found again and again should we choose to stop long enough when we are outside, and look and listen. 

detail of red wall - made with clay-rich earth from the Lowther Hills

the entrance to the RSA carpeted in sheep's wool

oak passage, made with branches from windfallen trees

 

The second person I want to highlight is the man and the book he was talking about at the Book Festival: Robert Macfarlane.

Is a River Alive? is the title of his latest work. It traces the courses and the fates of three of the world’s rivers, in the high mountains of Ecuador, in southern India and in northern Canada. Each of those rivers is threatened by human activity, because of mining, pollution or damming, or a combination of all three. One of them is already practically dead, only a few of its creeks and lagoons brought back to life by river-rights campaigners.

But the book is about much more than whether a river has enough oxygen to support its fish, insects and plants. It asks whether rivers have rights similar to our human rights, not because we endow them with rights but because they are rights-bearing entities in and of themselves. If a river does have rights what are they? Does a river which for centuries or longer has flowed out to the sea have a right to continue to do so? Does it have the right not to be straightened out so that it flows faster or be channelled underground so that houses and roads can be built on top of it? And what, crucially, might be the benefits to humankind if we treated rivers as we have started to treat some animals, as precious irreplaceable entities – beings? - in and of the natural world? 

 

And finally I am Nowhere with Egyptian-heritage, pro-Palestinian activist and very fine actor, Khalid Abdella in Traverse One. 

I am given a small envelope when they scan my ticket. It contains a single piece of paper, a pencil and a slice of mirror. Later on I will try to draw my own face on the paper while looking at the mirror and not at the drawing hand. 

 

In the midst of an intense and at times harrowing exploration of friendship and love, political oppression in Egypt and the the relentless Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank the drawing exercise is a moment of camaraderie and mirth. It also a reminder of the portrait Khalid has shown us of his grandfather, a lasting memento of his imprisonment and resistance. This is a deeply felt personal and political piece of theatre in the best traditions of the Festival. 

 

Once it leaves Edinburgh where it is sold out at every performance, Nowhere goes to Geneva (11-13 September) and then to Dublin as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival (10-12 October).