With six months to go before Edinburgh’s Tourist Tax goes live, a bundle of good, bad and indifferent plans have been lined up to spend the expected £50 million proceeds, writes Herald columnist and ex-Edinburgh councillor John McLellan

You need to be getting on a bit to remember Eartha Kitt in her ‘Santa Baby’ heyday, but at the tail end of her career there was the sultry American songstress – the most exciting woman in the world, according to besotted film director Orson Welles – looking somewhat bemused in the Royal Scottish Academy on an August Sunday afternoon.

I imagine she was thinking of what she was going to do to her agent for signing her up to judge floats in the Edinburgh Evening News Festival Cavalcade, as my boss, the editor Harry Roulston, wracked his brains for ways to keep the conversation going with someone who clearly didn’t wanna talk. “And have you been to the castle?” That kind of thing.

But the Festival Cavalcade was a big gig. Launched in 1976 by Edinburgh District Council, the Evening News stepped in to rescue the event when it was on the point of collapse and built it up into a major free attraction. Princes Street was closed, around 200,000 people lined the route from Regent Terrace to Kings Stables Road, for a parade lasting about two hours, with floats from businesses, community groups and Fringe companies interspersed with bands and the Tattoo performers, with a reception for the great, good and not so good in the RSA.

A new and enthusiastic marketing director, anxious to impress, told us he knew British Airways chief Bob Ayling and insisted he could arrange for Concorde to land........

© Herald Scotland