No festivals, no tourists - Edinburgh feels empty and silent

August dawns and Edinburgh is incredibly quiet. Worryingly quiet.

The festival season has been lost in its entirety.

Venues which ought to be a hive of activity amid final checks right now are empty and locked up.

This time last year we were half a dozen shows into the 2019 Fringe - the Assembly preview night firing the starting gun for three weeks careering from venue to venue, soaking up the atmosphere and spending a small fortune on food and drink.

The city may have a love-hate relationship with the festival - and there is much to re-think and re-imagine  - but the bottom line is it brings huge numbers of people who spend heftily on tickets, food, drink and accommodation. Without it, everyone takes a major hit.

Last August we packed in some 75 shows., This August - we have one; a walking tour in the company of Arthur Smith.

The city’s emergence from lockdown has barely begun. It’s almost impossible to spot more than a handful of tourists.

The escalators which spill people from Waverley Station into the heart of Prince Street are quiet, and tour buses are next to empty as they trundle around the familiar landmarks.

What it needs -a month of festivals  - it simply cannot have.

A stroll through the Fringe heartlands on the first Sunday evening in August underlined the scale of its absence.

The Cowgate - that cramped, chaotic, vibrant quarter - is closed for roadworks. The rabbit warren of stuffy, dusty  rooms, and bars charging laugh-out-loud prices, are padlocked shut.

We scoot up the hill next to the mortuary, up past Surgeons' Hall, where teams of fliers normally swamp passers-by with endless leaflets and boundless enthusiasm, and the railings  groan under the weight of  posters.

It’s open, but the chairs are all empty. A smashing place to chill out on a summer’s evening struggles to find a single customer.

We cut across to Nicholson Square, past the mosque kitchen - one of the best places in town to eat and go - past the closed Greenside, where some gems of shows can always be found, and across to the very heart of the Fringe; Teviot Square, the Pleasance Dome and George Square Gardens.

The only sound is the trundling wheels of skateboards, and the thud as they land after yet another pointless, repetitive jump up a concrete step.

The spectacle of folk trying to sell their shows, the celeb-spotting, the billboard of daily schedules to help folk thumbing through brochures or scanning apps, the packed bars - all gone along with the legions of lanyard  wearing hingers-on yakking about who’ve they’ve seen and what’s hot this year.

And no snaking queues of folk with tickets in hand waiting to be told when and where to move before the doors can finally open.

 No silent discos bursting into song and everyone joining in. It feels incredibly hollow. And quiet.

George Square is just a garden once more and it looks tiny, and the walkway to the Meadows has lost its constantly changing cast of buskers and performers.

Summerhall is still, and we pop our heads into The Pleasance to find a deserted courtyard.

No colour, no lights, no buzz, no giant deckchair to clamber into, no people. The cobbles are silent.

Queuing at the Pleasance was always a pain  - “now, let’s all take one g-i-a-n-t step forward” said the lanyard wearing staffer is if they were herding a bunch of toddlers remains my ‘favourite’ moment  - but the shows always seemed to tower about the limitations of the venue.

Colin Cloud mesmerising  full houses in the main auditorium; Arthur Smith’s beautiful tribute to his father; the genuine warmth for Nicholas Parsons even as age made him ramble and ask the same question more than once; the power of dramas such as The Incident Room; the startling live performances from Camile O’Sullivan; the sight of David Hasselhoff striding through the courtyard sprinkling stardust and awe;  the gobsmacking brilliance of FishBowl; Rich Hall opening a bar on stage during a memorable late night hoe down,  and the Doug Anthony All Stars’ utterly triumphant return which left the woman in front of me watching it all through her fingers, utterly bewildered at why everyone around her was helpless with laughter. The list is endless …

August without festivals will feel strange. The city needs it back, and it needs it work even better for all, too.

But, above all, Edinburgh needs to fall back in love with the Fringe.