Arts diary: Writer and rider likes a challenge

Published on Wednesday 9 September 2009 21:37

IT'S one thing to cycle nearly 900 miles along the Danube for charity, but it's surely another to do it on a bike with no gears. "It has one gear, to be pedantic," says the author Kevin MacNeil. "It has a large chainring and a small sprocket. It's a big gear, quite hard to cycle."

"Book writer and bike rider", novelist and poet, MacNeil penned the offbeat Scottish bestseller, The Stornoway Way. He has performed his poetry from Sweden to Colombia, where he read to a crowd of about 10,000 in Medellin, but this is a different challenge.

He's riding the track bike – courtesy of the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op – about 100 miles a day, collecting material for a travelogue-cum-memoir and also being filmed for a TV documentary.

He's raising money for both Cancer Research – you can donate at www.justgiving.com/KevinMacNeil – and Macmillan Cancer Support (donate to this charity at www.justgiving.com/KevinMacNeil2).

Taking a 20-gear bike would be less challenging, he said. "The inner Calvinist in me promotes a masochistic streak, and likes to make it more difficult. It comes from the Isle of Lewis upbringing."

Straw without bricks

COULD the new home for the Edinburgh International Film Festival – or other long-awaited cultural buildings in the city – be little more than a house of straw? A 60,000 feasibility study kicks off in London next week into plans for the UK's first carbon neutral theatre, to be built from straw bales, with reclaimed doors and even recycled steel from the London Olympics stadia.

The project – to provide a new home for Hackney's pioneering Arcola Theatre – is sure to open up debate on the greening of theatres throughout the UK.

Arcola chief executive Ben Todd hopes theatre-lovers will buy a bale – and even lay it on the walls – in a unique and eye-catching fund-raising drive.

"Everybody should be pushing for low-carbon building, and everyone in existing buildings needs to be looking what they are doing," he says. Theatres have a small carbon footprint, but a high visibility when it comes to changing behaviour, he adds.

Ideally the new Arcola building would be of three- to four-storey straw bale construction – typically finished with board or plaster – with a 350-seat main theatre. It would have two smaller studios, an eco caf, a gym and offices, a biomass boiler and solar panels. Arcola, currently based in a former factory with an audience of about 50,000 a year, has already experimented in cutting lighting use in shows from the typical 30-50 kilowatts to more like five.

John Stalker, chief executive of the Festival City Theatres Trust, running the King's and Festival theatres in Edinburgh, says: "We are acutely aware that the issue of how we offset our carbon emissions is increasingly important, in transforming very old and inefficient buildings like the King's into buildings that can save energy."

Rankin's novel role

IAN Rankin revisits old haunts when he opens a multi-million-pound redevelopment of the University of Edinburgh's Main Library in George Square today.

The Rebus author studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh, and was a regular visitor to the library as a postgraduate student, when he wrote his first two novels.

Three floors of the A-listed 1960s building, designed by the architect Sir Basil Spence, have been transformed and updated in an on-going 60 million redevelopment.

"Then, as now, books were expensive, meaning the library was a Godsend," Rankin says. "When I wrote my first couple of novels, the library was also my first stop – so I could photocopy them!"

There are those, of course, who believe the building of the library – along with nearby Appleton Tower – was the architectural crime of the century. The infamous "battle of George Square" saw the wholesale destruction of that Georgian gem in favour of modernist monstrosities.