The Merchants Hall

It's a very strange experience to go to an FP coffee morning and be surrounded by a collection of people with white hair, with not so toned bodies and not recognise a single soul save the friends you plucked up courage to go with.
Suffice it to say that there seemed to be a dearth of people present still paying their own bus fares. I think you get my drift.

For only the second time in my life, I was persuaded to attend one of those gatherings of the old 'Queen Street Girls', a name that has a faintly suspect ring to it, in the Merchants Hall in Hanover Street.
The tables seem to be occupied by year groups and while the table behind was full of FPs from the year above me at school, my table had only 4 stalwarts at it.
This lack of cohesion in my class of -8 has always been so. We had the reputation of being solo high fliers and individualists who would rather gouge out our eyes than congregate in later life with our fellow school mates.
I and the three other table members are obviously excused from such fame and fortune and are more than happy to see each other from time to time.

And so we drank coffee with pinkies extended as is the wont of us Edinburgh Ladies and enquired about offspring and grandchildren, while the morning passed in a haze of nostalgia.

Our old school is almost unrecognisable now, having moved to an upmarket part of town, has fees which would probably preclude most of my erstwhile peers, but has the delight of boys from the brother school in Sixth Form.
Now that would have been something else.