Edinburgh dispatch

I have visited Scotland nine times in my life: to Orkney (twice) the outer Hebrides, the west coast, the east coast, skiing at Aviemore (twice), the highlands and the lowlands. For some reason, however, I have never visited its splendid capital city. Last weekend I finally put that right. And my goodness, am I ever glad I did.


It had snowed in the days before our visit, and there was still quite a bit around when we arrived in temperatures hovering around zero degrees. We were at least appropriately dressed, and attacked its major sights with some gusto: the elegant shopping district which is Princes Street, with a large Christmas fair situated right next to it in the shadow of the great Scott Monument. Innumerable stalls could be found selling everything from genuine German bratwurst (manned by genuine Germans) to outlets featuring cashmire scarves (almost impossible to avoid in Edinburgh), again staffed either by Germans or Chinese with broad Scottish accents. It was cold, but great fun and we parted with much of our cash but securing what we felt to be bargains (that, by the way, is the definition of a bargain: if you think it's a bargain, it is).


Next door to the Christmas market lies the Scottish National Gallery, featuring a sumptuous collection of works by masters both old and new. Perhaps the highlight for me was a room housing seven large pictures by Nicolas Poussin, depicting the Seven Sacraments. The atmosphere created was so powerful you almost felt as though you were standing on holy ground. There were other marvels too: the largest known picture by Vermeer, two wonderful Van Goghs painted during his sojourn at the insane asylum at Arles, and, especially poignant, a self portrait by Rembrandt painted towards the end of his life when he had suffered the disgrace of bankruptcy and was forced to sell his art collection and most of his other possessions. You can see the tiredness of life, the ennui coming from his eyes which, it seems, can only see the way forward to dusty death...


The following day we trudged up another glacial dunlin along the Royal Mile to the dark, imposing mass of Edinburgh castle, standing proudly atop a volcanic remnant, much restored in recent times but retaining enough of its ancient past to preserve its atmosphere redolent of the grim march of history. My highlights were the Scottish Crown Jewels, where, sharing the same bullet-proof glass case as golden crowns and necklaces with pearls the size of your thumbnail, was the celebrated Stone of Destiny- just a three hundred block of rough sandstone- or is it? It isn't hard to see it as imbued with some magical, animistic power.




Picking a day of reasonably clement weather we decided to make the walk up Arthur's Seat, a 252 metre high volcanic peg which actually lies within the city limits, a little enclave of wildness surrounded by the hubbub of modern city life. The walk proved much more of a challenge than we anticipated. Here the snow and ice had not melted as it dad done on the city streets, making the steep paths extremely hazardous, especially on the descent, which seemed, reassuringly, to present a formidable challenge to nearly everyone attempting the journey. I saw one Japanese girl simply sit down on the sheet ice at one point and burst into tears. As we slithered past, her boyfriend was doing his best to encourage her, putting his arm round her and whispering encouraging words into her ear (in English, oddly).


My own wife was not dressed quite appropriately for the occasion. She wasn't exactly wearing a cocktail dress and high heels, but her apparel might have been more suited to, say, shopping in a city during the winter. Nonetheless, we both made it up and down without major catastrophe, an achievement of which we were both justifiably proud.


On our last day, back in the relative safety of the city again, we spent a couple of hours wandering in Edinburgh's "New Town". In 1766 the architect James Craig was given the task of gentrifying the area of the city north of Princes Street to attract "men of rank" to the city. And over the course of the next twenty years he created a Georgian enclave that rivals anything to be found in Bath, Buxton or Harrogate. In an area of 500 rolling acres he built a network of streets, squares and circles with a panache rivalling anything achieved by Hausmann or L'Enfant. Magnificent rows of town houses look out over a series of delightful little parks (most of which,  as in Mayfair, are locked against the general public). I presume most of these huge houses are now divided into apartments, though the atmosphere remains extremely gentile. At a small café in the heart of New Town I overheard a trendy young man ordering his breakfast: "I'll have the veggie breakfast please."  Then an afterthought: "With bacon."
Why not?
Edinburgh. I have heard it described as the Athens of the North, and while I am usually suspicious of anywhere being described as the something of somewhere else, on this occasion I believe it to be justified. Edinburgh is not the Athens of the North: it is entirely its own entity: one of the most beautiful cities in the world.