Pass.

Collecting your film festival pass, if you have one — a process I call MATRICULATING — is a different experience depending which festival you’re at. In Cannes it can take up most of an afternoon and involve the sacrifice of a minor limb (fortunately, this doesn’t have to be YOURS, the Fest-Beast that dwells in the sub-sub-basement of the Palais des Festivals isn’t particular).

In Edinburgh it takes about thirty seconds, and the pass is dispensed by one of a coterie of attractive twenty-something girls. More girls man the doors, opening and closing them to speed your egress, greeting you AS IF YOU WERE SOMEBODY, to the point where you wonder is this a film festival or a particularly inane sexual fantasy?

No films for me today! Instead I was seconded to a conference at the Art College, my regular place of work, an institution that sometimes seems to be in the process of tearing itself apart in pursuit of solving chimeric problems. Today’s session was positive, though I would rather have been seeing Scottish film-maker Chris Waite’s mortifying semi-doc THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF MY SEXUAL FAILURES.

Best sentence uttered at the conference: “X has kind of been doing that job…before it existed.” A thought worthy of Joseph Heller. I want to seek out X and inform her that she’s spent a year doing a job that doesn’t exist. “Sucker!”

This evening I head back into town for the screening of graduates films at the Filmhouse, a celebratory event much more up my particular street. A great crop of films and students this year, all of which I am keen to encounter again, and which hopefully will go out into the world to be seen by the rest of you.