A Dreich day for Camelot

A pall was cast over the festival yesterday, a pall we in Edinburgh call Typical Festival Weather. It rained consistently from morning until night, casting the bright posters and pillars of the August city into heartless grey. There are advantages to the rain, though. Gone were the merciless crowds of Saturday, they wouldn't have been as thick on a Sunday anyway but the streets were remarkably free for a festival weekend. People choose shows close to them, places they can visit without suffering the rain too much and they're less inclined to stop and chat in the street when the weather is dreich.

It was against this miserable backdrop that The Moose and I went to see The Mechanisms perform their latest work High Noon Over Camelot - a song cycle reinventing Arthurian myth to set it on an aged space station in a decaying orbit. The Mechanisms have arisen out of the Steampunk movement, in case that wasn't obvious from the description of their work.

Getting to the location was a challenge, it was held in the Whynot?, one of the George Street clubs. George Street is, on a night out, where uncool people go to pretend to be cool. The Cowgate is cheaper, dirtier, more dangerous and more fun. George Street is expensive and has that cold façade of all destinations where people actually dress up to get drunk on a Saturday night. As a result, I have no idea where the clubs of George Street are and this one turned out to be in a narrow alley between George Street and Rose Street.

Arriving late was not a problem, though, as The Mechanisms - ironic given their name - were suffering technical difficulties and started later than we arrived. Once they started the show was spectacular, brilliant music made by beautiful people and some very clever lines. It is more than the sum of its parts, though, and the story genuinely tugs at the heartstrings as it reaches a conclusion which you will recognise as inevitable if you know anything of Arthurian legend.

The Mechanisms was part of the Free Fringe and, as such, they were taking tips at the end. As with every free show I've seen this year they were giving away gifts if you paid a certain amount. There's were the best I have witnessed so far, with an album if you donated £5 which I considered quite the bargain, adding their latest to my festival haul so far. The Moose already has all their albums so she took a poster and grinned broadly as she did so. The Moose is a dreadful fan-girl, blasé poise is beyond her.

After lunch we then went to Jenners for Bad Boys : Whisky Theatre. This show included whisky tasting, making it the third show so far that included alcohol. The Moose and I have been to several whisky tastings but this was the most unusual. The show itself is a lecture which flits between historic bad boys who have little or nothing to do with whisky and the bad boys of whisky - methods of advertising and production which are now illegal, or at least not legally allowed to call themselves 'whisky'.

The tasting involved tasting some 'swish' - whisky taken fairly nefariously by workers at stills which meant that he could not even tell us how high an alcohol content it had, though judging by the nose and palette it was pretty high. It also included some whisky which was a teaspoon blend - a single malt that had been deliberately blended with another ever so slightly so that it could not be sold as such for commercial and contract reasons.

It was definitely a tasting I could recommend to those who have been to tastings before - it is not the usual tasting fare and worth the experience for any fan of whisky. When it finished The Moose and I made our way home, there was no point staying out further, unlike whisky the festival is not improved by the addition of a drizzle of water.