This year I shall have lived in Edinburgh for a quarter of a century. I fell in love with the city on the 23 bus travelling from the New Town to the Old Town. There was so much architecture. Gothic and Georgian, medieval, baronial. So many turrets and finials, tollbooths and towers. I was drunk on the stuff. Add pomp – a Royal Mile, a castle, a palace. Then the libraries, art galleries, museums. And that’s before you get to bookshops and Edinburgh’s proud moniker, the first Unesco City of Literature. What other city has a railway station (Waverley) named after a novel or a high street (Princes Street) with shops on one side and gardens on the other?
The 23 bus was taking me to the psychiatric hospital just beyond Morningside
Edinburgh doesn’t love me. It’s probably too haughty to love anyone, unlike Glasgow, which wraps its citizens in an umbilical hug from which they can never escape. But the city isn’t as snobby as it used to be. Even though it still has these amazing private schools (like Fettes and James Gillespie’s with huge grounds and huge fees), it welcomes strangers. It welcomes asylum seekers and Chinese students and festival goers (though it’s thinking of charging the latter a tourist tax), and it tolerates me.
The 23 bus was taking me to the psychiatric hospital just beyond Morningside, where I had a job as a writer in a team of artists hoping to help the patients. I didn’t last long. I discovered the patients didn’t like words much. Words are so reasonable. So grammatical. Tangled and troubled hearts and minds are more easily expressed with paint, colour, anything tactile. I left the job, but I stayed in Edinburgh.
I shouldn’t have been there really. It felt like a mistake. Back in England, I’d been married to a Scot who was forever lamenting his exile. I got fed up with it. And after one too many holidays on Skye, swore I’d never go to Scotland again. Then my son began work at a yoga centre in Edinburgh. Then my daughter was given a place at Glasgow University, and then, after a year as writer-in-residence at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, I came to Edinburgh and found the International Book Festival. These days, I think Edinburgh was my destiny. It was in my cards.
Until recently, the Book Festival was in Charlotte Square Gardens (overlooked by the manse of the first minister). The garden was full of big tents where you could sit and listen to famous authors while the rain pattered gently on the canvas overhead. The place was full of poets and novelists and book lovers queued round the square for a seat in a tent. There was a wonderfully fancy yurt just for the authors. I wanted to pitch my own tent and live in the garden forever. In lieu, I bought a flat not too far away.
During my early years here, I invited all my friends to the International Festival and to the Fringe and the Book Festival. I spent a fortune on tickets, queued endlessly, and loved the vibe and excitement and passion of it all. I’ve only been to the Tattoo once (not being of a military disposition), but I loved hearing, every night, the gun going off and the lone piper playing his lament from the castle ramparts.
Then there’s the best walk in the world, down the Royal Mile. Pass the Writers’ Museum and the Storytelling Centre and the statue of the poet Robert Fergusson, and all the narrow wynds off, and there’s the Poetry Library. When I found it and its wonderful director of the time, Robyn Marsack, I knew I’d come home. Venture past the Poetry Library (if you can), and you find the Scottish Parliament’s extraordinary Enric Miralles architecture and, keeping it company, the Palace of Holyrood.
In later years and with age, I’ve become a bit like many of Edinburgh’s residents: slightly resentful of our city being taken over by tourists for all of August. Now you can’t get on a bus in your own city and the restaurants won’t let you book a table. But it’s only one month of the year, and when they’ve gone, a wonderful calm comes over the place and it’s ours again and you can chat about it to the taxi drivers.
Last year, for the first time ever, ill health meant I missed the Book Festival in its new abode near The Meadows. I’ll be back this year, though maybe not quite so often as before. I missed Hogmanay too, but that wasn’t my fault. For the first time since 2006, it was cancelled by the weather.
Edinburgh was 900 years old last year, and not for nothing is it known as the Athens of the North. It’s that skyline of Arthur’s Seat on its volcanic rock, the castle looming over the city, St Giles’s Cathedral (its tower topped with a crown), and the spires of St Mary’s that grabs your heart. Of course, there are parts of Edinburgh that are ugly and horrible, but I never go there. And there are trams now, which weren’t here when I first arrived. I don’t go on them. Too new for me.
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