DIARY
GREY GOWRIE Itravelled to Edinburgh with the artists Gilbert and George, whom I had met at a friend's house the evening before. They have lived and worked together for 30 years, wear identical suits and have old- fashioned manners and charm. They are staunch Conservatives, admirers of Mrs Thatcher. George pointed out at supper that when they tell interviewers this, the interviews grind to a halt and they can go back to work. The Festival is showing a film, Gilbert and George in China, which is well worth seeing, even if, like me, you do not relate easily to their work.
The visual arts at this year's Festival are dominated by two great shows: Velazquez in Seville (his early work) and a big Giacometti exhibition of paintings and drawings as well as sculpture. This will be coming to the Royal Academy. At the Velazquez exhibition, I gazed at a paint- ing I knew from youth. When I lived in County Kildare, my friends and neigh- bours included Alfred and Clementine Beit. Their Velazquez, a masterpiece by a 19-year-old of a servant girl preparing supper, given by them later to the Nation- al Gallery of Ireland, was stolen, along with their Vermeer, from their house in Wicklow by Dr Rose Dugdale. I was at Oxford with Dr Rose, and, ever hungry for notoriety, have been known to boast that I once took her out. The truth of the matter was that I took out a girl who brought her along; we went to a Wimpy. Rose, I have been told, cut her teeth by stealing her father's pictures. Later, fel- low-travelling with the IRA, which disap- proved of her, she filled a milk churn with explosives and tried to bomb the border town of Strabane from the air. She missed. Some years after the paintings were recovered, the Vermeer and others were stolen again. I had recently stepped down from being a Minister in Northern Ireland — a puzzling appointment given that I am the only Conservative I know who is not a Unionist: I believe in joint rule. I rang up Jack Hermon, then head of the RUC, an ecumenical man I like and admire, and whom, while nominally his Minister, I served. I felt he might be able to point me in the right direction to help retrieve the paintings. He rang back a few weeks later. 'Bad news,' he said. 'They've destroyed them,' I said, horrified, thinking too of the great horse Shergar. 'Not that,' Jack replied. 'But it's an ODC job.' ODC is Northern Irelandese for Ordinary Decent Criminal. The ODC in question was a notorious Dublin crook. When in due course the pictures were again recov- ered, the IRA shot him. You can pick up a massive guide to the Fringe, free, even in small shops in Edin- burgh. Unless you follow form closely, or get a personal recommendation, pot luck is the name of the game. I won the lottery with Lady Macbeth Finned My Buttocks, a 90-minute theatrical sketch written and performed by four women. The mire-en- scene was a good idea. An Om-chanting, New Age, Islington-dwelling female troupe comes to the Festival to do a Macbeth with Japanese rod puppets. They find them- selves double-booked in a leisure centre with Edinburgh's leading step-aerobics teacher. There is a culture clash, and tem- pers fray. Great one-liners rattle out like bullets. At one point the teacher says, in a refined Momingside accent, 'I'll have ye knaw, ah'm the only step-aerobics teacher tu have conducted a full workout on the plains o' Culloden, and ah'm nevair goin' tu raist until Scawtland has buttocks o' gran- ite.' I laughed like a banshee throughout, and had to cool down over a pint of Gille- spie's at the Real Beer section of this Festi- val. Gillespie's is Scotland's response to Guinness, and though a bit sweet, it is palatable.
Idined at Hawthornden Castle with Drue Heinz. Hawthornden is the small and perfect fortification, teetering over a forest- ed chasm in earshot of its river below, where lived in the 17th century the poet William Drummond. Drue, one of the few philanthropists to give large sums of money to literature, endowed Hawthornden as a writers' colony years ago. She takes it for herself for the Festival. The poet James Fenton and the novelist Darryl Pinckney were there. Darryl has, with Robert Evans, adapted Virginia Woolfs Orlando for the stage, with Miranda Richardson in the title role. Unfortunately I missed it, but hope to go later. At dinner James and Darryl took a stern line about genre fiction. Drue and I have somewhat Kingsley Amis views: the sage said he preferred John D. MacDon- ald's Travis Magee novels to Saul Bellow. We discover a shared liking for Nicholas Freeling's work, and I ranted about Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler missing the Nobel. One of the most talent- ed young composers in Britain is Thomas Ades. Perhaps there will be a libretto for an Ades opera of The Long Goodbye, now that we are allowed to commission works on the Lottery.
Up here, people argue from time to time about who is the greatest living Scots- man. Sean Connery leads the field, and he is indeed the last of the megastars, as you go to see his movies not for his acting but for him. He is as good as Gable or Mitchum, which is saying a lot. He is in town and has been submitting our Minister, Virginia Bottomley, also here, to a Bond- style, lip-curling, treat-'em-rough approach over the British film industry. My own can- didate is the 90-year-old Sir Stephen Runciman, the greatest living historian. The debate coalesces in my mind because in London recently Sir Stephen enthralled me with a terrifying account of the Locker- bie horror. He lives there. A genius of cine- ma, Stanley Kubrick, lives, reclusively, in Britain. If he and Connery submitted a bid to us to fund a Lockerbie film, I would be surprised if they were not successful.
Drama of the traditional, nail-biting kind dominated the final hours at the Festi- val. Timothy Clifford, the director of the National Gallery of Scotland, had only two days to find the last £165,000 needed to secure the Castle Howard Guercino of Tancred and Erniinia for the nation. It had been bought by the Getty Museum in Cali- fornia and an export delay granted to see if a British museum could match the price. Tim asked me for inspiration. I rang Po Shing Woo, of the leading Hong Kong law firm which bears his name. He has set up a foundation to help the arts in Britain. At five to midnight, as it were, Mr Woo made a massive donation. Tim was over the moon and so was I. But I dread my next meeting with John Walsh of the Getty, also a gener- ous-spirited man.
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