Arts diary: The festival which has moved to avoid the Fringe and the torchlight festive Vikings

Although I'm still slaving away at the coalface of truth (as my predecessor used to say), I'm feeling pretty festive myself. The presents are wrapped, Sufjan Stevens' Christmas album is on and I've sent the rest of my family off to the supermarket to do the Big Shop while I type away happily with a cup of coffee. There have to be some advantages to working Christmas week.

Someone else who is geared up for the festive season is Michael Farmer, a Viking from Shetland (yes, you heard me right), who is to lead the torchlight procession in Edinburgh on 29 December as part of the city's Hogmanay celebrations. The Guizer Jarl for the South Mainland Up Helly Aa festival on Shetland, Mr Farmer - a joiner and father-of-one by day - is looking forward to processing through the capital at the front of 15,000 torches.

While Up Helly Aa isn't technically a festive season festival - it takes place between January and March - it does have that cosy, wintery feel about it which is what we're all looking for at the moment and something the Jarl squad will undoubtedly bring to Hogmanay.

Looking ahead to summer

Possibly winning the competition for the first of the Edinburgh festivals to unveil plans for next summer - which, in these dark days, feels very far away - North Berwick's Fringe by the Sea has announced its initial line up, including Belle and Sebastian and Louis Theroux. Perhaps most interestingly, the festival has, for the first time, opted to tweak its timing so that its initial week of events does not clash with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, held 30-odd miles away.

In the past few years, there has been a growing fear that there are too many events on at the same time in Edinburgh in August. Stadium gigs such as Oasis and Jon Bon Jovi have done little to help that, causing a bottleneck in accommodation as fans flock to the capital, pushing prices higher and having an adverse impact on Fringe ticket sales, particularly at small venues and for less well-known performers.

I'm wondering whether this could be the start of a trend to spread out the festivals a little. It has happened in the past. The Edinburgh International Film Festival, to take one example, used to take place in June, well away from the main festivals season. For Fringe by the Sea, this may be the right move to capture as large an audience for its events as possible.

Yet the draw of the Edinburgh festivals is that they all take place together. It is chaos, it is madness, it drives the year-round population demented. But for artists, the melting pot of big names, up-and-comers and one man monologue shows all under one metaphorical roof is what the festivals are all about.