PANALBA

EVERY Autumn, the Edinburgh International Festival rolls over Scotland's Capital like a massive blanket, transforming the stately New Town and the cobbled streets of the Old Town into a frenzy of street entertainment, with living statuary, street markets, fun and frolics far into the night, and every available public space bursting with performers and audiences, if they are lucky.

It all begins at the end of July with the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, rapidly followed by the opening night of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle and the first gasps of the Fringe Festival. The Edinburgh Book Festival in Charlotte Square Gardens, and the "official" Edinburgh International Festival kick off mid-month, the latter taking us into the first week of September and culminating with a spectacular firework concert on the final night. It has all come a long way from that first Festival of the Music and Arts launched in 1946, conceived to bring the disparate peoples of Europe and the world together in a recognition that a terrible war had come to an end and that peace and reconciliation were the order of the day.

Since then other festivals have spring up globally in many countries, but the Edinburgh International Festival remains unique,luring visitors to Scotland from the far corners of the universe. In previous decades, you would find the great violinist Yehudi Menuhim performing at the Usher Hall with that legendary songstress Marlene Dietrich in cabaret just around the corner. World performers, musicians, actors, singers and painters have passed through the town leaving their indelible marks. An elderly neighbour of mine has never got over encountering Burt Reynolds on a bus. A year or so later, she ran into the actor David Sole in a coffee bar, and her day was made when the comedian Joan Rivers asked her for directions to Holyrood Palace, or so she says.

For those of us who live at the heart of Edinburgh, however, there are mixed emotions about all of this going on around us. In principle, we love it, the fun and excitement and the bustle of life pulsating through the streets in a swarm of humanity; on another level, it totally disrupts our everyday lives as all of a sudden everywhere we go people are talking different languages, and everybody we have ever met in our lives is on the telephone wondering if they can come and stay for a night, weekend or a week.

So far I have had my nephew and his family of five in town to see the Tattoo. This afternoon I have said my farewells to my Canadian cousin Gloria and her New Zealand boyfriend Ross, who now live in London. They packed in seven shows over four days plus a visit to Tantallon Castle and the Bass Rock and a bar-b-q in North Berwick. On Wednesday, I have the German theatre director Lutz Deisinger arriving from Berlin, and the following week, the well known journalist and columnist Rory Knight Bruce comes to stay, followed shortly afterwards by Willie Lyon, the London-based Wine Writer from the Wall Street Journal. It is all go in the Athens of the North.

And where else could you find such cultural diversity as local authoress Rozy McDougal reading random samples of her poetry in a church hall, Caledon (the Three Scots Tenors) belting it out in white Elvis Presley kilts in a Spiegel Tent in Princes Street Gardens, the Australian temptress Meow Meow, the girl group Fascinating Aida , the Samoan Theatre Company's production of The Tempest - without a body, and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra alongside a breathtaking exhibition of impressionist paintings at the National Gallery of Scotland and writers such as Christopher Brookmyre and Frederick Forsyth.

Moreover, the climate, despite periodic downfalls of torrential rain, has been particularly benign this year, transforming the spacious avenues of the New Town and narrow wynds and alleys of the Old Town, European-style, into sunlit walkways lined with bustling street caf é s. I n a few weeks time it will all be over with a magnificent firework concert held below the old castle rock. Tranquil Edinburgh will return to its former dignified self as the first signs of approaching winter start to manifest in the autumnal colours of our green spaces.

When the Edinburgh International Festival was first conceived sixty four years ago, it was considered an immensely daring venture on the part of a grey old city situated on the north-east coast of an island off the west coastline of a devastated European continent. Since then it has mushroomed into the largest cultural extravaganza in the world. Those who have shared that experience overt the decades have returned again and again.

I would imagine that Edinburgh's Lord Provost of the day, Sir John Falconer, and Rudolf Byng, the Austrian impresario who first proposed the idea, must be watching from above with a well earned smile of self-congratulation.