Hello and welcome to Not Another One, the podcast with me, Steve Richards, Ian Martin, Miranda Green and Tim Montgomery.

Now this still being the dregs of the summer recess, Miranda is swimming

in Suffolk. She's always swimming in Suffolk at this time of year. And Tim is elsewhere too,

but Ian and I around, I just literally minutes ago got back to London from Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Festival, which I have to say in, I know

you're in Edinburgh a lot, you've got to get up more for the festival. It was really good this year.

I think the weather made a difference. There was a fantastic mood around the place.

And I did 14 shows, actually, all of them different different a different theme each day and it was very

it was very stimulating enjoyable and absolutely bloody knackering well I was going to ask you how

you know how it all went but you obviously you got a great reaction from what I hear yeah the

audiences were really good and engaged

and you sort of, you know, five minutes before I go on doing these shows, you think, what the

hell am I doing? But then you sort of at the end, it's an hour of very intensive focus,

but you get so much back from the audience and i see that

i signed books at the end and speak to many of them and of course many podcast listeners have

not another one in my rock and roll politics podcast and it is really uh fulfilling and you get to know

some of them as as friends over the years I mean I've been

doing the show in Edinburgh for 10 years so yeah and there was a lot of energy and I

actually wrote a column while I was there for the new statesman saying that

somehow or other politics needs to get some of the energy that you feel at the Edinburgh

Festival. And I was referencing really the era of political oratory, which has gone completely.

There used to be a sense of excitement around various political speakers on the right and left.

It's all gone. And yet people queuing up for things here, and it's almost as if one man shows have replaced

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