Overlooking the dead

I drop Claire at Broughton Place to run home over the hills, and then catch the bus from Dolphinton. In town I have an appointment with the lawyers in Atholl Crescent - three hours of meticulous, essential tedium.

It’s sunny outside - so I picnic in Princes Street Gardens in the midst of office workers, tourists, and French schoolchildren, excluded from the northern portion by fencing protecting us from the unexplained works that are being conducted.

A couple of hours are spent in the empty comfort of The Guildford, sipping a singular pint and committing the fruits of my morning’s labour to the cloud. Then the incredulity of being told by the nice man at the Apple shop that it would cost £60 to replace the missing rubber foot on my MacBook.

I walk down Calton Road to call the accountant (not about my MacBook - that will be sorted by Amazon). The road is being dug up again. It seems to be in a permanent state of renovation. Above it, the Calton watchtower is scaffolded and, presumably, empty, there being no call to prevent grave robbing in this modern, enlightened age.

I muse on the death, over the weekend, of Martin, a colleague and acquaintance. Suddenly gone, leaving wife and children, mourned today by hundreds on social media - some that knew him only as an online dispenser of measured, sober wisdom.

To distract my train of thought, I call Graeme and entice him down to Waverley for a chat. He’s training for a triathlon, is in the final stages of building a house in the garden of his Inverleith home, and is two years into the drama of divorce. It’s good to catch-up.

From Waverley to Doncaster I talk to a woman from Bridge of Don. She works in the NHS, is anti-Brexit, but has a strongly held view that the NHS is being taken advantage of by EU health tourists in a non-reciprocal fashion. I don’t envy her spending a week with an elderly aunt in Grimsby.

The Lives of Harry Lime keep me company the rest of the way, before I’m engulfed, not by the sewers of Vienna, but the sultry darkness of the Euston Road.