The vibrancy of the Edinburgh Festival

I’m doing a show in Edinburgh for the first time in a long while. It’s fun, although I feel I’m basically wearing a scent called Elder Statesman (I’m hoping it smells more of ancient leather and authority than incontinence). I get stopped in the street a lot, including by some people who have not mistaken me for Ben Elton. One of the two shows I’m doing, at Assembly Studios at lunchtime, is a Q&A based around the themes in my books Jews Don’t Count and The God Desire. The idea comes from doing loads of literary festivals, where I tend to get interviewed by a luminary for 50 minutes and then there are ten minutes of questions from the audience. But it’s often that bit that I think the audience really want. So I’ve decided to cut out the middleman/woman and see what happens.

What happens is a show that becomes an interesting mix of crowd work and hard thinking, kind of stand-up philosophy. But it feels like a proper conversation, and the questions have been great, although every so often there’s a curve ball. A young man at Sunday’s show asked: ‘How did you feel about the interview you did on your documentary with the woman who says the thing about sex and radishes?’ A small audience survey later revealed to me that there is a meme on social media, in which Miriam Margolyes – who indeed I did interview on the Channel 4 film of Jews Don’t Count – insists that she would prefer, in some circumstances, a radish to sex. Eating one, I should make clear.