Scotland The World Over

THE WAY WE WERE

Warriston Cemetery, Edinburgh, c1966.

We are both smoking! This started because my wife-to-be worked in a café and brought back a packet of cigarettes someone had left behind. The packet remained untouched for ages but then we gave in. We don't smoke now, of course.

Edinburgh was my second real home, a place I shared with my wife-to-be. It was grey and daunting at first. Our first night was spent in the Bruntsfield Youth Hostel. It was May and on waking up the next morning I remember seeing snow on the ground. A fellow traveller with an American accent swore out loud and promised to head South immediately.

Once we established ourselves we grew to love the city.

We remember early mornings with the street cleaners on the slopes of Dundas Street, hosing the gutters; mist circling in and obscuring the sky above the canyons formed by the tall tenement blocks; bonfires actually on the streets on November 5th; classy cast-offs being left on the street for the bin men with us taking our pick and bagging a curling stone (which we eventually left behind) but not bagging a chaise longue (which I regret to this day); wet cobble stones; erudite, poetic graffiti on the walls of the lavatories in certain pubs; the appeal of the island bar in the Abbotsford on Rose Street; early pub closing times and drinking in a hotel on Sunday because the pubs were closed; a friend who occupied a flat that belonged to the poet Robert Garrioch; going to poetry performances, brushing shoulders with poets, generally being close to poetry for the first time in my life and getting to know the work of Norman MacCaig; being taken to a betting shop for the first time; The Traverse Theatre and the first time we experienced the actors in a play interacting with the audience; folk music in the pubs; The Paperback Bookshop; Jim Haynes who had a flat above where one of us worked; the public baths on Henderson Row; a tip of 10 shillings for services as a waitress at Willy's Café; women brawling; cooking breaded mackerel caught that morning in the Firth of Forth; drinking sherry from the bottle at lunchtime at the News Theatre; Christmas packing at Jenners department store; helping a flatmate to carry an upright piano up 5 floors; walking the streets at night peering into basements; Browns of the Mound; looking for jobs in the newspaper reading room at Stockbridge public library; working at Murchies Creamery and being offered a bonus if you found a mouse in an empty milk bottle.

I took part in Scotland The World Over!