En Route
Again, as in Roadkill, you start at the Traverse — just four of you, three times a day — but are transported elsewhere: this time on foot round the city for a tedious two hours in a “pedestrian-based live art event” run by four Melbourne artists who are always on hand, presuming that you’ve been coming to Edinburgh all these years and not walked anywhere, or looked at the landscape.
You’re picked up and sent off to Grassmarket, up ginnels and down closes, into unattractive residential squares, Waverley Station (and asked to ponder the coming and going-ness of tourists: please!) the Balmoral Hotel, a record shop by Fleshmarket and the hideous car park in the St James’s Centre.
These are places you normally avoid like the plague, and the climax, feebly, is in an ugly precinct in a coffee shop. I liked fiddling with my i-pod, listening to the music, and reading my instructional text messages. But they should have taken us to Leith, or at least to Holyrood Palace and Calton Hill.
