Idiotic Hat: Embra

Saturday, 15 December 2018

Embra

North Bridge from Calton Hill

Brown Street and Salisbury Crags from The Pleasance

Edinburgh, like any sizeable city, has many faces. As well as the Festival, the Scottish Parliament, the galleries and museums, and the upmarket shops of Princes Street, it is also the city of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus crime novels, and of course the film Trainspotting. In between those extremes there is the usual acreage of suburban streets, with no doubt the usual accompanying vanities of small differences. So, a long weekend visit is not going to yield any more insight than, at best, some of the basic geography of the city centre: and even so I'm still confused about which is the Old Town and which is the New Town.

I do feel a slightly tenuous connection with the place, as my paternal ancestors lived in Edinburgh for several generations during the 19th century: they were "pocket-book makers", a sort of low-level bookbinding trade, having left behind a life of shepherding in the Borders in the early 1800s. However, my great grandparents moved the family down to London's Elephant and Castle in the 1890s, where my grandfather was born and grew up. Quite why is unknown. Their last Edinburgh address was a tenement on South Bridge, then a warren of artisans and tradesmen's families crowded into single rooms. But their accommodation in London was, by the look of it in the 1891 Census, far worse. Certainly, two of their five children died in Camberwell in 1891: hardly the best start to a new life. My father recalled his Scottish grandmother as a stern, humourless woman, with an impenetrable accent and vocabulary. He clearly had far fonder memories of his Hertfordshire-born gran. So, apart from some genetic material and possibly a few inherited behavioural traits, I'm about as Scottish as a Toronto resident descended from a family evicted and transported in the Highland Clearances. Indeed, I have a surprising number of Canadian namesakes: politicians, ice-hockey players, businessmen, you name it. It's them, I suppose, and the thousands like them around the world who keep the tartan regalia shops of Princes Street in business, when they eventually make the journey back to the ancestral "home".

Rather than offer any startling insights into a city I barely know, here is a little gallery of things that caught my eye. I must say I did like the place very much, and hope to be back. Although I was rather shocked by the number of homeless people sitting at intervals on most city centre pavements, listlessly begging in the cold and damp. There is a nation-wide homelessness problem, clearly, but it seems so much more acute when you imagine having to spend your nights on the streets of Edinburgh in winter, as the wealthy tourists pass by, heading for their hotels.