Glass & Thompson

Today's the day .......................... to sit in the window

This is a painting of me done by Will many years ago. I particularly like the way he has painted it with the big wine glass and the table - there's a sort of air of mystery about it. I was sitting in the window of an Edinburgh delicatessen café called Glass and Thompson, situated at the top of Dundas Street where it descends sharply down the hill to Canonmills.

Little did I know that seven years later, Alexander McCall Smith would write in his novel The Right Attitude to Rain of his heroine Isabel Dalhousie who was sitting exactly where I was -

........... From that point in the street, one could see in the distance the hills of Fife beyond: dark-green hills in that light, but at times an attenuated blue, softened by the sea - always changing.

Isabel liked this café, where the display windows of the shop it had once been had now been made into sitting areas for customers. Edinburgh was normally too chilly to allow people to sit out while drinking their coffee, except for a few short weeks in the high summer when café life spilled out on to the pavement, tentatively, as if expecting a rebuff from the elements.

This was a compromise - to sit in the window, protected by glass, and yet feel part of what was going on outside ..............