Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh street life

Lloyd Evans wanders the highways and byways and is entertained by beggars and buskers

At Edinburgh this year I caught a show I usually miss. The festival attracts a shifting underclass of cadgers, dodgers, chancers and scroungers, and each has a tale to tell that’s as fascinating as any of the ‘real’ entertainment. The show is free. All it takes is a little inquisitiveness. There’s a cobbled lane just north of Princes Street full of cafés, shortbread shops and tartan knick-knackeries. Here the tourists throng and the beggars and buskers follow them. Every ten yards there’s someone rattling a pot or throttling a tune. Beside Frederick Street a trio of student violinists are sawing their way through one of Vivaldi’s elevator classics. Opposite them, sheltering in a doorway, sits Alan, an aged slab of tramp with a beard like an abandoned allotment and a lisp so pronounced that he could pass for Sylvester the cat. ‘Had a good day?’ I ask. ‘Thodding hopeleth.’ he replies, scattering tramp-spume down his thick coat. ‘Them kidth are thpoiling thingth.’ I glance over. Their begging bowl gleams with silver and this instantly makes me feel Alan’s distaste. How unjust that these bright-eyed youngsters and their facile mimicry should outrank, and out-earn, a proud old vagrant parcelled up in his raincoat and stubbornly refusing to tempt the public with anything more than his defiant talentlessness. I give him two pounds. He grunts and tosses his head in valediction. I go over to the students. ‘Why Vivaldi?’ ‘People love it. So do we,’ says the second-desk violin.

We city folk seal ourselves from each other beneath brittle layers of incuriosity and self-importance. But to break through this frail crust is to enter a rich and troubling parallel world, a hall of human wonders and horrors.

Phil, a slender wand of a man, is busking outside a pizzeria.

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