Edinburgh again

Driech and haary; theatre doing Gulliver's Travels in the original Romanian; no trams. Edinburgh much as I left it.

Having left it, I could count its flaws and failings all along my fingers and end up on my toes, of course. But most of what I dislike about Edinburgh as against Glasgow - things as diverse as quotation marks around Scots words in pub-signage, the lack of buskers not playing the pipes in full-kilt, the brazen hypocrisy of all those 'saunas' and 'massage salons' ranked up alongside the Temples of High Culture, the circle of outlying schemes kept away from the centre like the tarnish around a brass tap - springs from pretence and concealment. That, or a sense of privacy inflated to take in whole grand dead-ends sheltering behind their 'Keep out!' signs.

But there are things about Edinburgh, as my home-town, which can be neither concealed nor fenced off.


I never missed home.
Why miss what's waiting, just as you left it?
I fit into old memories as if into old gloves
Stored safely in some bottom-drawer of the mind.

'Home, where the air smells like air and the sky's the right height...'
The sky hangs low and damp on crags and hills.
The air smells of suggested rain, never quite falling but
Filling the air, tickling my cheek;
Of trees, and of the history of things.