I met him at Edinburgh College of Art, where he began by explaining how what had begun as detached artistic observation has now become a movement and a place which he feels he just can’t leave.

You can listen to the piece on Iplayer for the next seven days – it starts 17 minutes into the program. It’s also followed by a great interview with Paul Mason, author of “Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.”

Last weekend delegates from Occupy Camps around the UK gathered in Edinburgh for a conference – the second national UK conference of it’s type – to discuss the challenges facing their camps, and to brainstorm positive ideas to tackle them. They met and stayed in the building formerly occupied by the Forest Cafe, which had been squatted for three weeks and re-opened as a “People’s Cafe.”

There were some serious issues – particularly the pressure which many of the camps are feeling from people with alcohol ,drug and mental health problems who are being attracted to the camps. But there was also a great sense of positive energy at the conference, a desire to learn from mistakes and share experience.

This is the subject of a discussion we are planning for the new year on the BBC Culture Cafe, and one in which we’d like you to give your views. We are also looking for contributors, so if you have something to say on this subject, please comment on this blogpost or tweet the @BBCCultureCafe

I’ve been following the trail of the artist around Edinburgh for the last six weeks, trying to work out who they are, and why they are doing it – you can hear my feature on the BBC Book Cafe at 1:15 on Monday the 28th of November.

Nowadays we remember in different ways. With Remembrance Day just passed, many of us will have worn a poppy, watched the ceremonies on television, or listened to stories commemorating the fallen on radio. But these acts somehow lack the permanance and solemnity of words carved into stone.

In Scotland, this skill of carving words onto stone is a dying art, with few practitioners left. But Radio producer David Stenhouse and poet Robert Crawford, who are making a documentary about Simonides, managed to find one craftsman from Historic Scotland who still has those skills.

This radio piece was broadcast on the BBC Book Cafe on Thursday the 14th of November. 

If you’ve passed by St. Andrew Square over the last month, you can’t fail to have noticed the village of tents that have sprung up there. Occupy Edinburgh protesters have been there since October 15th, one of the smaller protest camps that have sprung up in city centres around the world since the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in September. The Edinburgh site is now pretty well established, with a kitchen tent, social space and program of events.

Last weekend there was an open day of activities, including “pedal powered” screenings of three documentaries. So, we went along to take a look – and even took a tent down so that we could spend the night.

The Guardian has just published a cool new online Edinburgh city guide. The guide features recomendations for pubs, accommodation, museums, vintage shops and outdoor attractions.

There’s even a playlist of Edinburgh songs put together by Ian Rankin (I’m having a listen now as I write this.)

Actor and writer Alastair Mackenzie has made a video about his favourite places in the capital.

I also contributed to the guide, putting together four themed cycle routes through the city; canal boats, coffee and breweries, art and nature down the Water of Leith, the city centre to the beach, and the castle to Duddingston Loch.

Check them out, and let us know what you think – maybe you’ve got a route you’d like to suggest?

There’s an outline description of the documentary below, but there’s an awful lot to do before it sees the light of day – above all, I have to find time to both pitch it and produce it, which is going to be a challenge with my current work commitments.

Last days of the Forest – a radio documentary

The Forest is an award winning, radical arts space in the heart of Edinburgh – a safe haven for the creative and chaotic,  the weird and the wonderful.

Or at least it was.

Operating on a shoe-string budget, staffed by volunteers and  funded by a vegetarian café, the venue operated as a free, open access arts venue, steadfastly refusing to charge for thousands of shows, exhibitions and events.

But this August the venue, and the people who made it come to life, had to say good-bye to the building that they had made their home. The charity that owned it had gone bust, and the building was up for sale.

The Story

This radio documentary will follows the last ten days in the Forest in its home at 3 Bristo Place – the passionate efforts of volunteers to hold onto the building, the intense artistic activity of the place during the Edinburgh Festival, and the sad but beautiful rituals as they said goodbye.

It explores the reasons that some people are drawn to places like the Forest – why they find themselves investing more and more of their time, energy and love in something so seemingly fragile and ephemeral.

It is also a tale with a hopeful ending. The Forest is still running a campaign to buy the building back – and I hope that by telling the story of the people and the place, I can contribute to that campaign.

With ten days to go before they must vacate 3 Bristo Place, and the Forest is having one last has decided to try to raise the money to buy the building – or at least enough to put down a deposit.

I’ve spent the morning interviewing and recording Rachel McCrum, who at this moment is setting up a “We Fund” site with a target of £100,000 – with a ten day deadline. If they get to the total, they can buy the building. If they don’t get to the target, they’ll get nothing.

We Fund is one of a number of crowd-source funding sites, which use a combination of different pledges and rewards to encourage people to give to charities and creative projects.

Forest members have spent the morning coming up with rewards for people who donate – everything from a buritto (£10) to a private gig from local punk rock musician Billy Liar (£1000).

The top reward is currently a years indentured servitude from a Forest volunteer – though the £1 million price tag might put people off.

The new pledge site should be up later today – I’ll update this post with a link once it goes live.

UPDATE – 19:06

I’ve just heard that they’ll launch the pledge site tomorrow morning to coincide with peak web-traffic.

UPDATE – 23/08/2011

Still no sign of the new We Fund account – it seems that they have to be approved before they can go live on the site, which takes some time. They still their Just Giving account for donations though.

Those last few days, it seems to me, would make a compelling video or radio documentary, and I’ve been exploring the idea of covering them with various members of the Forest over the last few days. The idea would be to spend each day with a different person, as a way of exploring the people who make this arts space special – and, of course, covering any developments that occur along the way. Will there be an last minute changes? Will they manage to raise enough money to buy the building, or at least enough to put down a deposit for a mortgage? Can Price Waterhouse Cooper be pressured into changing their mind, and allowing them to continue to rent the building – at least until they find a buyer?

On the other hand, I am aware that work I do with community groups in social media might well be of great assistance to the Forest right now, in helping in any last effort to look for financial donors and philanphropists. The kind of work I have been doing with Edinbuzz and the Innertube Map would be very useful for them in getting their message across, in creating a flow of material and stories about the Forest, and encouraging people to donate money.

This has left me of something with a dilemma – one familiar to the documentary maker, though perhaps less so to the news journalist – how involved can, and should, one get?

My feeling is that I need to decide whether I am documenting what happens over the next ten days, or whether I am trying to affect what happens over the next ten days – and that I cannot try to do both. I even ended up discussing this with one of the Forest members this evening, Rachel McCrum.

Perhaps surprisingly, Rachel thought I should stick to documenting events. “No-one has really managed to explain what this place is.” she said. She also though that it would be valuable to have someone independent – an outsider, like myself, hold a mirror up to the Forest, to show it with all its pros and cons.

Tomorrow I’ll need to make a final decision on this. I thought you might be able to help me decide. Which options do you think I should choose?

UPDATE – 16:38 – SUNDAY 21ST AUGUST

In the end there was a substantial majority – 70% to 30% – in favour of me approaching this as a documentarian, rather than getting involved. There were also some valuable comments from people, both on the blog, and on twitter. Michael Traill argued that there were lots of people in the Edinburgh social media community who could help them out with the campaign. Some thought that I was making a false separation, and that the journalist oten influences the story.

David Eyre’s suggestion on twitter was to embrace both;

@tomallan Can you not do both? Personal involvement would give a nice arc to the doc. And it'd be a good thing to help out.—
David Eyre (@davideyre) August 20, 2011

This is certainly an interesting idea, and indeed, may be a necessary one if I am to be truly honest about the story. In some ways I feel like I have already influenced events quite strongly, just by talking to people from the Forest about their plans, and offering advice about social media tools and strategies. In a way, that speaks about how very open the Forest is an organisation – it’s almost like a vacuum, pulling like-minded people into it and encouraging them to get stuck in.

At the moment though, I plan to step back from that, and record events as they unfold. And if I do end up getting pulled in? Well, as David said, that can become a part of the story too. But my gut-feeling is that you can’t do both properly.