I’m doing a show in Edinburgh for the first time in a long while. It’s fun, although I feel I’m basically wearing a scent called Elder Statesman (I’m hoping it smells more of ancient leather and authority than incontinence). I get stopped in the street a lot, including by some people who have not mistaken me for Ben Elton. One of the two shows I’m doing, at Assembly Studios at lunchtime, is a Q&A based around the themes in my books Jews Don’t Count and The God Desire. The idea comes from doing loads of literary festivals, where I tend to get interviewed by a luminary for 50 minutes and then there are ten minutes of questions from the audience. But it’s often that bit that I think the audience really want. So I’ve decided to cut out the middleman/woman and see what happens.

What happens is a show that becomes an interesting mix of crowd work and hard thinking, kind of stand-up philosophy. But it feels like a proper conversation, and the questions have been great, although every so often there’s a curve ball. A young man at Sunday’s show asked: ‘How did you feel about the interview you did on your documentary with the woman who says the thing about sex and radishes?’ A small audience survey later revealed to me that there is a meme on social media, in which Miriam Margolyes – who indeed I did interview on the Channel 4 film of Jews Don’t Count – insists that she would prefer, in some circumstances, a radish to sex. Eating one, I should make clear.

A few questions have involved the issue of Jews in films and plays and TV dramas not being played by Jews. This is something that I’ve spoken and written about many times, in the context of Jews not counting, that is, not being treated the same way as other minorities. Like all other types of calling-out of anti-Semitism, this leads to furious rage and pushback on social media. It’s also often misunderstood, as I don’t care very deeply about authenticity casting either way. What I care about is that one minority is left out of that stricture, and what that says about how people see Jews. But before I left for Edinburgh, I wrote a piece for the Jewish Chronicle about Oppenheimer, a film where – even leaving aside the main character – Einstein, possibly the most iconic Jew ever (happy for you to suggest others in the comments, Spectator readers: Maureen Lipman? Ronny Rosenthal?), is played by the Scottish-Italian actor Tom Conti. This seemed to blow up in the way these things do. These days, I don’t tend to look at Twitter, or as we wearily have to call it now, X, but every so often I’m aware I’m trending, and not in a good way (it’s rare that anyone is, unless they’re dead). This is partly because while it’s happening concerned friends will do that somewhat misjudged thing of sending me messages asking if I’m OK. This mirrors something that used to happen to me in the old days, when I would deliberately avoid the newspapers that I knew hated me. It wouldn’t work. A close mate would always ring to tell me something like: ‘Just thought I’d get in touch to say I think that was so unfair what they said about you in the Daily Telegraph: I mean, you don’t, you really don’t, look like Daniel Radcliffe’s homeless uncle.’

I do still post things on X however. Which led to a strange experience as I was on The One Show last week, in Edinburgh. As I was about to go on, I decided to post ‘About to go on The One Show’ and as can happen I inadvertently saw some messages saying I was – this is a word that social media’s really revived, hasn’t it? – vile, and calling for my head in very extreme ways. I’m used to this, but it’s strange to think you’re inured to it and then find you’re not, particularly when seconds later you have to jolly it up on the BBC with Gyles Brandreth.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen to all this hate and rage if, as may happen, Elon Musk’s weird rebranding leads to X biting the dust. Because Twitter, for all its smallness compared with the other big social media platforms, is the one that has driven the sense that you are carrying around in your pocket a device that could at any moment explode your life. It may be a better world without it, or the hate and rage may just migrate elsewhere. Either way, one thing about Edinburgh is it feels (despite all the advertising for shows on the internet) healthily non-digital. As you walk among the thousands of posters offering every type of show, and the street theatre, and the buskers, and the bustling hungry-to-be-entertained public, it feels like the RL in IRL is still there, vibrant and expectant and driven by something human that doesn’t require a machine, except perhaps for microphones and lighting.

I flew here from London by the way. As I went through security, a very nice woman in a hijab, who said she was a big fan, asked me if I was going to Australia. I said ‘no’. She said ‘oh’, and looked a bit confused, and we went our separate ways. Then I remembered who lives in Australia: Ben Elton.