When it comes to Edinburgh, who creates the more accurate portrait, Ian Rankin or Alexander McCall-Smith? Both, I suppose and Edinburgh, like any city in the world, has a thousand different faces.
Ian Rankin notwithstanding, I love it. I’ve decided it is now officially my third favourite city, after Melbourne and Ahmedabad.
To be fair, I am always on holiday when I visit. Plus, I stay with my dad and step-mum who I love to pieces, so I am predisposed to being relaxed and cheery and receptive to the charms of my holiday destination. And I’m never there long enough for the weather to get me down.
Having said all that, however, Edinburgh is a place that feeds my soul. Something about it makes me feel instantly at home, contented, restored. It fills me up like a long cool drink of water.
Our first full day in Edinburgh this time around was brilliantly warm and sunny and we seized the day, drove to South Queensferry where the bridges cross the Firth of Forth, and caught the tiny Maid of the Forth to the Island of Inchcolm where there is a ruined (but remarkably well preserved) 12th century abbey, like a mini-Iona. It was a perfect blue-gold day and we gloried in it, pottering around the buildings and marvelling at the toughness of the life of monks 800 years ago.
Next day, happily, was cool and wet, perfect Edinburgh weather. We scored the front seat on the top of a double-decker and rode into town, rain lashing the windscreen. I was in heaven.
I love walking around Edinburgh in the rain. The sets (big cobble stones) gleam cream and pink and grey like semi-precious stones, the castle lowers as it should and the buildings are even more forbidding than they are in sunshine.
Edinburgh must have its ugly, dismal parts, like every city the world over, but they are few and far between. From Princess St, you see the backs of the houses on the Royal Mile and realise that they are eight stories high – maybe the first ever experiment in high-rise living – medieval tenements. The ‘New Town’ – ancient by Aussie standards - has its Georgian splendour, but as you leave the centre of town and wander into the burbs, the beautiful houses continue, mile upon mile, street after street of elegant, dour residences, three stories high, unfussy and unpretentious
Most of all, I love the profound, utterly sodden green that is everywhere. Edinburgh, my step-brother allegedly said when he was a wee lad, is a city with a lot of country in in. Arthur’s Seat is the most spectacular example – a great hunk of wild Highlands, plonked smack down in the middle of a capital city, so that you can walk from the CBD and be in lonely moorland in a matter of minutes.
But even right in the town centre there are acres of green. Formal gardens to be sure with tidy flower beds and emerald lawns, but also random steep slopes covered with cushiony mosses, lush grasses and shrubs and generously sheltering trees, graveyards where you could get lost in the abundant wild growth around the headstones and fallen stone angels, green and damp and fertile everywhere you look. I glory in it. It is the thing I miss most in our hot, dry, brown, prickly continent. It feeds my soul like the 23rd psalm.