Festivals & Fireworks

Last night I stood in the darkness of Inverleith Park and watched Edinburgh Castle on the not so distant skyline form the back drop to the spectacular firework display that marks the end of the Edinburgh International Festival and festival season in this city.

I wasn’t alone. Hundreds of people sitting, standing, with cameras, with glow sticks, with children, with picnics, with mates flowed over the grass of this vast north Edinburgh park to enjoy the show. A large screen stood in front of our view of the castle and gave us all close up images of the accompanying concert whose sounds synchronised with the dazzling displays that filled the early autumn evening. The air was stuffed with the scent of candyfloss, take away food and expectation as the large round lights which illuminated the park were extinguished once the first note sounded and the first firework lit.

Sure you can buy a ticket to watch the concert and fireworks in front of your eyes in Princes Street Gardens – if you’re quick enough off the mark the minute they go on sale. But outside of this tiny patch of the city centre, this event is free, unticketed and one of the reasons why festivals, and the arts, work in Edinburgh.

Many people in Inverleith Park won’t have been to a performance at the International Festival, maybe not even the Fringe and possibility not any event at any of the other festivals that consume Edinburgh throughout August. This event is for them. It allows everyone to be included and to see a show on their territory. It’s also a thank you to the city for putting up with overcrowded streets, an onslaught of posters, flyers and marketing of every kind and for the invasion of performers, press, promoters and visitors who fill every room, every restaurant table, every bus seat and every inch of the Old and New Towns.

Of course we all welcome the money they bring, the jobs they create and the local businesses they support. We all understand that the festivals are of direct benefit the city’s economy and we would not have it any other way.

But this event goes beyond box office income and profit margins. It gives everyone in Edinburgh the opportunity to celebrate and to profit from both the hard cash and the art. This event reaches out to everyone and gives us all a moment of wonder, a moment of being amazed, a moment of seeing Edinburgh Castle and the history it embodies celebrated and transformed by the amorphous business we call ‘the arts’.

As we all now take a deep breath, clean up the city and calculate the revenue from what everyone is predicting has been a bumper festival season, somewhere on the multitude of spread sheets being drawn up, there has to be a column for the value of transformation. Income calculations will not be accurate if they don’t include the profits our hearts and minds have made from the stories, laughter, new ways of seeing the world, new understandings and the sheer spectacle that the arts contributes to everybody’s lives – always reaching out and often asking nothing in return.