Charlotte Square: loitering within tents

The Financial Times recession oracle Gillian Tett spoke compellingly about the causes of the credit crunch, and discussed the economy's likely direction with William Hopper and Philip Augar in The end of the world has been postponed. Augar was tasked with making a prediction: he's not optimistic. Similar sentiments came from some more financial journalists, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, who see more instability without substantial—and improbable—reform. When talk turned to the future, a collection of top economic brains did a fair amount of head-scratching, and offered a financial forecast to match the weather.

Nicholas Stern, author of the government's 2006 study of the economic effects of climate change, went over the key message from his new book "Blueprint for a safer planet": an unprecedented global treaty on global warming must be made in Copenhagen later this year, binding rich nations to swingeing carbon cuts immediately. He seems optimistic, which is lucky, since the alternative is too gloomy to contemplate.

Angry, passionate Glaswegian Tom Leonard's opened his appearance at Word Power by calling a recent Scottish Review writer a “bloody cunt”. Yet, as he read from his new anthology, Outside The Narrative (which covers his poetry from 1965–2009), the audience were privy to a softer side of the poet – glimpsing a view of the husband, father, and emphatic endorser of the “universal human”. Drawing on memories from his son’s wedding and nights holding hands with his wife, Leonard confirmed his position as the poet who resists the ease of categorisation.

Alasdair Gray, best known as the author of Lanark, sparked off his hour in typically unconventional manner. Helped by Gaelic writer Aonghas MacNeacail and a woman picked out of the audience (conveniently pre-miked...) Gray read his short play entitled Voices In the Dark. While MacNeacail joked that “we have done a bit of scripting for this event”, Gray admitted that everything he does is always “very unplanned”. But it was his Q&A session that revealed the most about the man who claimed to originally write “only from a strong sense of loss”. While he claimed to be out of ideas, his eclectic performance suggested that his creativity was far from dried up.

The first appearance of the storytelling evening The Moth met with bemusement from the Charlotte Square audience. A rumoured appearance by Sex Pistols mogul Malcolm MacLaren didn't transpire, leaving the storytelling up to two young New York comics, one of whom felt the need to define the Torah for our benefit ("the Jewish holy book" - nice to know!) and two Georgians - George Dawes Green, the organisation's founder, and Edgar Oliver, a playwright with a stage persona that can only be described as mad camp Nosferatu, and an accent more luxuriantly voweled than the Queen's. A bizarre evening benefited from a fiddle-playing timekeeper and free whisky.