Apocalypse knocks Edinburgh Festival off the front page

The world’s biggest carnival seems to have been in town for months, so it’s quite sobering to realise we have only just completed the first full week of the Fringe.

And it’s been quite a dramatic seven days here in Edinburgh, where the festival itself has not been centre stage. It all started off on Monday with apocalyptic warnings about potential loss of life due to Storm Floris.

We were told not to leave our houses unless strictly necessary. We were warned that the weather was so severe that if we went to the corner shop for a newspaper or a pint of milk, we would face certain sudden death.

The BBC lunchtime news carried grim warnings about cancelled shows at the Fringe. Not that this deterred students handing out flyers in the Cowgate. The storm force winds merely turned their leaflets into paper planes.

As well as the scenes from Edinburgh, the BBC also broadcast their traditional footage of some poor reporter doing their piece to camera in front of a full-on hurricane in Ardrossan harbour.

This seems to be Reporting Scotland’s go-to destination on a blustery day. I’ve always felt sorry for these people. When they signed up for BBC News, they doubtless held ambitions of a life of glamour as the Paris correspondent or the adrenaline rush of being part of a crew in a war zone. Instead they get packed off top Ardrossan on a grim windy Monday morning.

It was definitely unseason-al. We are used to storms like this in winter but not in early August. Scottish winters may be uniquely depressing but summers in this country can be even worse.

At least in the winter it gets dark at 4pm. On Monday night, you could look out of the window at 9.30 at night and it was still daylight so you could actually witness your wheelie bin careering down the street.

In November, you would not have known about this until first thing on Tuesday morning

In the end, Edinburgh dodged a bullet compared to the rest of the country, although it did impact the festival a bit. While all the indoor shows went ahead, the Tattoo was cancelled.

How soft are the modern military? Calling it off because of a bit of wind. Surely they must train to fight in extreme weather conditions. God help us all if Putin’s army manages to invade on a breezy day.

Then on Wednesday, the entire city was on red alert in the early evening. Walking through St Andrew Square towards my show at The Stand, the police helicopter was hovering overhead and fire engines and cops cars were speeding towards the scene of some incident or other.

The rumour mill went into overdrive, as Chinese whispers were passed from mouth to ear. Princes Street had been closed to traffic.

Some said there was a bomb at Waverley Station, others that a suspect package had been found under the Scott Monument. Someone optimistically suggested that a bus had ploughed into the Silent Disco.

It turned out to be a bunch of young ends kids chucking bricks onto the pavement from the roof of a building on Princes Street.

The one thing more disruptive than terrorism is bored kids at the end of the school holidays.