John Gibson: Todd knows the road to the isles

No man is an island, it’s said. You don’t say so, though, when David Todd is around, even if he has chosen to live on one.

He’d just moved in to a spacious flat in Royal Mile Mansions, the former huge furniture emporium, when I got to know him. Well, no, we’d become acquainted previously when for seven years he was director of the Edinburgh Festival Cavalcade.

We met up again at a reunion of the Cavalcade judges over a Rusticana repast in Hanover Street.

Now David runs a “retreat house” way out west, on the isle of Cumbrae.

A real switch but there he is infinitely closer to our maker than your scribe. He reckons the Cavalcade, ruthlessly pillaged by the city council, should be “reinstituted”. Thousands think likewise.

I find Todd’s words easy to swallow. He is living at the “Cathedral of the Isles”, reputedly the smallest cathedral in Europe.

He retains what he terms a “wheelchair-friendly” pied-a-terre in city centre Edinburgh. I should add that he himself has no need of a wheelchair.

Bugging me

Panic at the Fashion Week in New York where models have been struck down with the novovirus tummy bug. We have to welcome the news. It might cure the models of their trademark boot faces.

Anything that rids them of that constipated look must be a triumph for mankind. Indeed, this will be a story that runs and runs.