As huge swathes of the entertainment industry head north to Edinburgh for the month, here’s a short festival tale from years gone by.
Edinburgh is, by some margin, the most expensive place in the UK to buy a gram of coke. So, in order to save themselves a bit of cash, a group of well-known television executives arranged for a Geordie dealer they knew to drop off their festival rations when their train pulled in to Newcastle station.
It was a split-second plan, and it quickly hit a snag. As they were en route, the group got a message from the dealer saying he was running late for the drop. As their train was only scheduled to stop in the station for a minute or two, the execs had to improvise.
To create a distraction, they had one of their number (a man with a visible disability) pull the passenger alarm and feign a medical emergency so that the train would be held in the station while carriage crew could assist him. An act that the guy kept up until the dealer arrived and handed over the package.
As soon as the coke was secured, the afflicted exec underwent a miraculous recovery – and the train was then able to continue on to Waverley station. |