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[morgueatlarge] Edinburgh
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morgue
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Sep 07, 2008 23:55 PDT
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I admit it - when the train came rolling into Edinburgh and I looked
up and saw the Salisbury Crags and Calton Hill and the Jacob's Ladder
stair - my heart was beating faster. Hopping off the train and walking
up to Princes Street, a cool breeze and the gardens and that
unmatchable view of the Old Town skyline, and the buses shoving each
other aside, and seeing the numbers on the buses and remembering
exactly where they went, the whole network of the city opening up in
my head, and that was it; home again.
In the week that followed I was privileged to sit down once again with
many people from my Edinburgh days - too many to name individually
here. With each there was that odd version of catching up you do these
days, where you know the surface of everyone's lives from emails and
blogs and facebooks, but the depth of it has been out of reach, and so
the conversation isn't so much charting a course as taking a sounding.
With each there was that happy normalcy that always comes in, a
relaxation into company as if you've only been around the corner, and
that for no time at all.
Mostly, apart from seeing folk, I followed my habitual self and
walked. It's a good city for walking, manageable to get across, and
packed with interest and incident. Each time I turned a new corner and
saw a familiar sight I was pleased and felt a charge of satisfaction.
A few small changes caught the eye, some good (St Andrews Square
opened out as a public park), some bad (Ndebele shut down, Ottakars
Books gone). I didn't run out of streets - by week's end there will
still many habitual byways I hadn't returned to, let alone the hills
around. But it rained; all week, it rained. I didn't worry, because
this is part of my Edinburgh too.
It was festival time with all that promised - visitors everywhere,
crowds outside the venues, rain-soaked flyers disintegrating
underfoot, young performers sauntering down the street still in
makeup, conversations starting "have you seen..." When I first
realised that my trip up here would coincide with the festival I
wasn't too impressed - for all its frenzied entertainments, it isn't
proper Edinburgh, and the masses of tourists do get underfoot. That
first bus ride after arriving underlined the point - waiting to board
behind a succession of bewildered visitors who each asked where the
bus was headed, how much for the ride, counting out their money with
care, checking a second time... But the twist was on me, in the end.
My hesitation about the festival came from memories of trying to get
on with living while it went on around you, causing endless nuisances
that came to overbalance the fun on offer. As a visitor, however, with
no 9 to 5 and freedom to wander, the festival was a delight - so much
going on everywhere, a healthy buzz in the streets, the promise of
unexpected delights in strange little corners. I fell in love with the
festival again this visit, the sheer audacity of it - until you've
been, until you've held the massive programme in your hand and married
it to the army of smiling faces thrusting playbills into your hands as
you walk up the Royal Mile, until you've experienced it for yourself
you can't really comprehend the wonder of the largest arts festival in
the world being crammed into a tight little city like Edinburgh.
So the final day, searching the city for a particular magazine to
bring home as a gift, a quest that would prove unsuccessful. Walking
up Lothian Road, hands stuck in my pockets and smiling because the
brewery smell was thick and yeasty in the air, wee neds dodging past
me and insulting each other in their impenetrable dialect, and the
castle sitting smug atop it all - and I missed the Auld Reek, I did.
Writing this now, back home, I miss it again. Perhaps some day I'll
call it properly home again, even if only for a little while. I have a
feeling it will welcome me, if that time should ever come.
And then I went home.
---
Respect: Steve and Suzie, who have previously appeared in these
messages for the Middle Eastern odyssey of 2005, were my kind hosts
down in Leith; thanks very much to you both. Love to all of you in
Edinburgh.
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