Every now and then a surprised face peered through the window: this was not business as usual in the Scottish Parliament, not even during the Festival of Politics.  For once the emphasis was on actions rather than words.  And actions can speak volumes.

The News Group drama workshop chose to work on a topical story very much at the heart of the Scottish Parliament – US reaction to al-Megrahi’s continuing survival a year after his release and how that is being covered by the media.

This was a special festival version of the News Group presented by ACTive Inquiry with Leith Open Space.  The event was a sell-out – at 10.30 am on a Saturday too – and perhaps half the group were regulars from the monthly workshop sessions that take place in Pilmeny Youth Centre.   New members added a fascinating range of skills and experience to the event in the Education Centre at the parliament.

Gavin leads a warm-up exercise

Without words the group arranged ourselves according to the distance we had travelled to get to the parliament (Gavin Crichton, director of  ACTive Inquiry, does a great line in warm-up exercises as you can see from the photo).  The shortest journey was just a 10 minute walk but Lorna had crossed water to get there from Argyll and Thom had driven from Carluke.

Once the workshop began we covered a lot more ground – back in time and across the world: from Lockerbie to Libya, from the Berlin nightclub to the White House, searching and sifting through the layers of a complex story rarely tackled in the media. In silence the group expressed questions leading to more questions in a chain reaction spreading across the floor.

It’s not over yet. The workshop ended – as it always does – with suggestions for the actions our Jo (or Joe) the active citizen could take.  The top vote went to an idea which could take the drama to a wider stage.  Instead of calling for a judicial inquiry, the group would like to see “ a theatre-styled  public presentation of the Megrahi case”.   It’s an ambitious idea – but it would be a very exciting development for the Festival of Politics.   We hope we will come back to it!

The Top Three Action Points

1. Create a theatre-styled inquiry
2. Research every source to find the truth
3. Make an amateur video (in Lockerbie) on the subject of innocence and victimisation

Is this the fringe of the Fringe, or the fringe of the fringe of the Fringe?  As the big circus moves out of town this weekend there’s an eruption of music, poetry, fancy dress and food (in no particular order)  in streets and gardens all around our part of town.

That ever-inventive crew at Redbraes have built a stage for outdoor events.  First to tread the boards will be Grassroots the Zimbabwean Theatre Company along with Flamencan guitarist Ricardo Garda at this weekend’s garden open day on Saturday.  Starting at 3pm.

Just a few streets away Pilrig St Pauls Church is rocking with the Retreat Festival on Friday and Saturday with a long line up of bands including Eagleowl and Found.  This is the annual micro DIY pop festival – to quote the Skinny and the LIST – and if this is the first you have heard of it (unlikely) then it is probably already too late because tickets are just about sold-out.

So to the Summer Fair at Montgomery Street Park which includes a poetry tent, music and a fancy dress parade on the theme of Parklife.  The fancy dress is intended mainly for kids but adults are invited to get in touch with their inner Damon Albarn.  And the poetry is of course for everyone.  From 11 am to 5pm.

Perhaps guerilla isn’t quite the right word.  But the ‘geopoetic’ poet Gordon Peters might just encourage his audience to explore the possibilities of guerilla gardening during his Allotted Span at the Botanics tomorrow (2.30pm Wednesday 25th August).  As Gordon explains in an email…

“I am talking a bit about the dimensions of allotting during a hopefully interactive hour,   beside
the Fletcher building and Temperate Glasshouse, and it happens to be on a piece of lawn the exact size of my own allotment.

“Maybe people will design their own space of garden  with insights from Thoreau, maybe we will consider the possibilities of guerilla gardening and  using ‘empty’ bits of urban land for community space. And a poem or two.”

The event takes place as part of the storytelling programme in the  ‘Secret Grove of the Garden’
[see more on the Invisible Structures website

And to give you an idea of the treat in store, this is what we just happened to find on Gordon’s website

An Empty Plot

A last late loganberry clings
—– pink and delicate
in a frost-crystalled nano-second sunbeam.
The speed of light helps
you through the dark side.
The memory of sister berries seeping
through white bread ——
the only sacrificial red worth knowing.

Just one of hundreds of images of the Pakistan floods, the YouTube series by Islamic Relief

An email arrives confirming our donation.  The World Kitchen in Leith evening at Out of the Blue raised a total of £288 towards the Pakistan Flood Relief Appeal.  It seems a very small contribution towards relieving some of the suffering in a disaster which shows no signs of letting up.

Pakistan estimates it could cost £10 billion to rebuild the areas devastated by flooding. But our donation is just one of many and it is good to see that the Disasters Emergency Committee has praised the UK response.

It is often hard to know where to start. We sent our donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee, a collaboration of 13 humanitarian aid organisations including Action Aid, Oxfam, Islamic Relief, Red Cross and Tear Fund.

Their mission – according to their website – is to get effective relief quickly to the people who need it most and it is worth taking a look at  a few of the hundreds of films online to get an idea of the scale of that task.  Some of the videos are just seconds long – one of them is a close up of a human face simply saying “I am so sorry” over and over again – others are professional reports by the BBC, ITN, AlJazeerah, South Asia News.  Together they probe into corners we do not often see on the nightly news bulletins.

The film at the top of this post is one of a series by Islamic Relief, charting the spread of the flood waters and the impact on people whose lives may be changed for ever – villages that have disappeared below the water, displaced people crammed into refugee camps.  As the Scottish comentator starkly observes, the  reality of life in the camp can be summed up with the simple arithmetic: two toilets to 8,000 people.

Haven’t got the T shirt – yet – but we are preparing to be part of the Festival

OK, this is the Festival of Politics and yesterday the chamber was occupied by people who had come to hear Annie Lennox, Martin Bell and Mark Thomas discuss Power of the People. It was Mark Thomas who put the ideas to the vote: “Can I be a little cheeky?” he asked. And how was deputy presiding officer Alisdair Morgan going to refuse the man who has toured Britain collecting some wonderfully progressive ideas for his People’s Manifesto.

So anything can happen in the Festival of Politics. And on Day 5 – Saturday 21st to be precise – we are about to find out what lies in store when you invite people to bring the news stories that are making them mad to an experimental drama workshop.

Leith Open Space is joining ACTive Inquiry, the radical theatre group, to present News Group, a drama workshop exploring topical issues. The idea is to encourage people to take an active part in events rather than passively consuming all the media throws at us 24 hours of the day.  (In the monthly workshops we have grappled with the public sector cuts, the global response to the Haiti earthquake, and the Big Society.)

News Group uses drama techniques to analyse current affairs but it also employs Open Space democratic processes and everyone in the group is equally important. The Open Space process began with Harrison Owen, an American consultant who has specialised in mediation work with large and diverse groups. His work in Africa taught him that people communicate most freely when they sit in a circle where everyone has an equal chance to talk and listen.

Interestingly, at yesterday’s discussion in the debating chamber Mark Thomas also commented on the significance of the seating arrangement; the chamber’s  semicircular plan deliberately encourages consensus in contrast to Westminster’s  confrontational layout.

On the way out of the Parliament we took a quick peek in the Education Centre where the News Group takes place on Saturday.  It can fit a maximum of 30 people so it will be a tight circle if the room is full. But it will  expand to accommodate a world of news.  And who knows what will happen.

Zawadi Alba, African Women’s Choir raising awareness of the Africa Centre with a performance in West Lothian

That very brief extract from the job advert hardly does credit to the creative energy of the Africa Centre Scotland who were actively involved in an innovative dramatic event at the Scottish Parliament in May this year.  And on Thursday (19th August) Zawadi Alba women’s choir will be at Holyrood again to support the lecture by Annie Lennox during the Festival of Politics.

But back to that job vacancy. The job – a 12 month part-time post paying £7 per hour –  is for a sessional admin worker to support the ACS Project Co-ordinator. Based in Blackfriars Street, ACS runs a support service and drop in centre for Africans who live, work or visit Scotland.  The Centre also encourages African Scots to take an active part in supporting international development in Africa so the job covers a wide range of office responsibilities as well as opportunity to meet many different people.

As the advert says: ” If you enjoy working with a community based organisation and would like to become a crucial worker to serve people of the African heritage please email: info@africacentrescotland.org.uk and reference SAW/002 to request for an application pack.”

Applications have to be in by 25th August.

When we escaped from the heat of the kitchen this is what we saw from the “minstrels’ gallery”overlooking the fantastic space of the Out of the Blue Drill Hall Arts Cafe transformed for the World Kitchen in Leith.  The music mixed by our minstrels, RadioMagnetic, is Quantic – Mishaps Happening (Tru Thoughts) and there’s that indefinable undertone hum of people having a good time.

Alice and Mridu in the kitchen, lots more pictures by George Lamb and Euan Wheatley on Flickr

Altogether it was a great experience. But  the night before the event we emerged from the kitchen slightly terrified. When it comes down to it, The World Kitchen in Leith is just a bunch of amateur cooks getting together for the fun of sharing food.   Under the careful coaching of Drill Hall Arts Cafe manager Chris Askham, I think we all realised for the first time the true scale of the task we were facing.

Head waiter, Ellie Casson [Picture by Gordon Peters]

Basically we needed to prepare, cook and dish up 60 meals and then get them out to the tables –  and with the right  food on the right plate!  That’s five cooks in a smallish space and lots of potential for getting it wrong: Gordon Ramsay’s worst nightmare could have been waiting to come true. But somehow it all worked like a dream.

We all had a lovely evening and the food was delicious.
Please pass our thanks on to everyone involved in making it such a great event.
We look forward to the next evening.
All the best
Dianne

So here’s our heartfelt thanks to Isi (Isabel Lohss), cafe training manager, who kept a smooth flow between kitchen and tables. Thanks to Stewart Blaik, our masterly Maitre D (and chair of Leith Open Space along with lots of other local bodies), who met and ushered guests to their tables in style.

Thanks to our fantastic waitresses – Ellie, Ashley and Asha – who kept orders coming and food going and made sure everyone was happy, along with help of cafe trainee Tammy McCormack and staff member Jodie Boswell Out of the Blue.  Thanks to Anny and Dougal from Radio Magnetic for bringing the world music to the World Kitchen. Thanks to Tommy for designing the menu and invitations.

A special thanks to our room full of guests who really entered into the spirit of the night (a meal is only as good as the folk who eat it!). And not least, thanks of course to the cooks: Alice, Celia, Meena, Mridu…and from me, thanks to everyone for a really great experience.  Recipes will follow soon both here and on Out of the Blue website.  World Kitchen will be back again soon – and there is always room for more cooks in WKiL so if you would like to join us just get in touch.

No F words! Going clockwise round the table: Celia, Mridu, Fay and Ashley

In capable hands: Mridu dishes up cauliflowers and cream

After several nights of dreaming about tables I realised that I need a GCSE in what Helen calls ‘waiter maths’.   The exam question would go something like this…

You have 60 people coming for dinner and four cooks in the kitchen.  There are  three hours for eating and drinking.  How many tables do you need to make sure diners have time to relax, chill out and enjoy their meal before the next sitting?  And how can you make sure they don’t all come at once – so that cooks and waiters meet orders without ending up like a scene out of Fawlty Towers?

We have the answer thanks to a little chart drawn up by Helen (her student years were subsidised by working and waiting in  Edinburgh restaurants).  And  thanks to Isi at Out of the Blue who going to magic up 12 tables – now we just need to manage the flow of bookings at 15 minute intervals.

(Cue John Cleese striding round the room muttering, ‘Table 10 is 5 minutes late, table 11 is 10 minutes early,  and table 5 is all over the place. Why don’t they pay attention!”)

But what are we worrying about!  All the bookings are from lovely people who will enter into the spirit of thing.  World Kitchen is all about the food and the company.

And after yesterday’s meeting we can’t wait to prepare and serve a menu you really won’t find anywhere else:  Mridu’s Indian Thali offering bowls of delicately spiced vegetables including black chick peas, Alice’s African fish curry served with ugali and spinach with peanut sauce [Alice is first on the right], Fatima’s Middle Eastern minted lamb meatballs with spiced tomato sauce, Meena’s pakora’s with green chutney made from her granny’s secret recipe, Celia’s Irish champ (which goes amazingly well with the meatballs) and Granny Barron’s Irish soda bread  (delicious with Scotch broth).  Not to mention Wojtek and Daniel’s absolutely delicious Polish cheese cake, sour apple cake and ginger carrot cake.

All washed down with world music selected by Radio Magnetic specially for the night

Just make sure you’ve got your table booked ). Ring 0131 556 4646 or email leithopenspace@btconnect.com

Just for fun lets flahsback to the 2007 FEAST in Out of the Blue (film by Alan Stockdale)