It’s not Christmas Day yet. It’s still Advent. So it’s appropriate that we’ve had to wait for this blog. Graham has filed his copy after being out and about for hours in Edinburgh. He’s not very popular at home.
Over to you Graham…
Christmas Eve afternoon I head into Edinburgh city centre, ostensibly to pick up some stocking fillers, vegetarian stuffing, plumper sprouts. Everybody is back home, and we have been cooking and wrapping all day.
I pass a guitarist called Inkfields: “To play with fire doesn’t make you an arsonist”, he sings, looking right at me. An image of The Shard flashes in front of me.
There’s a huge crush at the East End. Along Princes Street, outside Waterstone’s there’s a trio playing jazz Christmas carols. A few people throw coins in the double bass case. I think back to a Duke Ellington quote I heard recently: “There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick”. This ensemble’s gimmick appears to be wearing colourful paper hats.
I’m wondering about a meeting point arranged in The JAMs’ 2023: A trilogy: Shepherdess Café, London, 17:47, Christmas Eve 2023.
17:20 I pop into Black Sheep Coffee, opposite Edinburgh Castle. Having read the GANTOB blog, I think this is the best GANTOBverse surrogate for Shepherdess Café. I look around the ground floor, then the top. No likely candidates. But how can we know what GANTOB, The Benefaktor and The Foundation Doktor look like? There are certainly no grapefruit rolling around.
17:40. Still no sign. I order, avoiding matcha green, as per GANTOB’s advice. I’m going to sit beside the front door and watch people coming and going. The buskers walk past, laughing. After remembering a later meeting in the book I’m there until closing time. Waiting. Nothing.
I don’t know what I expected. I think of all the time I’ve spent digging, following up false leads, refreshing eBay and Facebook, watching for the KLF, and now GANTOB.
My feet get tangled up in a piece of garbage. I shake it off, thinking it’s a food wrapper. However, inspecting it more closely with the torch on my phone, I realise it’s a green Christmas hat, but made out of standard paper rather than the crepe version from a cracker. And it has words and a familiar grapefruit design. It’s been cut in half – in a zigzig, and then stapled together. It’s GANTOB’s “Paint Them Black” pamphlet, from November 2023. I wonder briefly if it’s the same hat the double bass player was wearing. And then I nip into a Tesco Express and pick up sprouts and a discounted Christmas pudding.
Graham
24 December 2023
GANTOB blog 