Brass Monkeys

Edinburgh. What a cold, cold place! Maybe more than anything that's its defining quality; the sensation that opens the door to its fundamental character, and all the experiences and memories founded on it and unlocked by encountering it, for the first time or over and over again; the damned cold!

You feel it on a night like last night when you step onto the street having to get somewhere. The sharp edged cold that fillets your cheeks as you bend into the wind and head towards your destination. Your shoulders hunch, and tears hang in the corner of your eyes, and you bury your hands as deep as they go in the too shallow pockets of your jacket as you look up through the glare of sodium lights at the grey, slab-sided buildings with their tall dark windows, spires and domes standing there immune from it all, mocking you from on high.

'Pull yourself together!', they cry. 'Call yourself a man? Christ, this is nothing! We've withstood this for five hundred years. We're designed for it! It's what living here is; hard, bleak, edgy. Forget the cherry blossom of May, or sun bathing in the Gardens in June, that's just playful teasing, a frippery, a dupe....no, this is your test, head down into the wind, scything cuts, quivering cheeks, trousers whipped round your legs. Come on, get on with it!'

So, you head down Causewayside, then South Clerk Street, Nicholson Street, and The Bridges, cross over Drummomd Street to The Pleasance (oh, the irony!) before dipping into the momentary respite of the sunken Cowgate...no warm cow licks here, mind, it's just a place for calculating where the next blast will come from, a bracing for the step round the corner into it, and in that moment a complete whole body awareness of all that Edinburgh ever formed in you, wrought from you; that determination to keep placing one foot in front of the other, and that keen, dammit, joy of life-enhancing pain!

Of course, along the way, you try to duck out of it, avoid it, spare yourself, be soft and have a half pint of warm 80/- beer in the legendary Stewart's Bar in Drummond Street. You can't find it after all these years, and look up, scanning the signage. A man at a door says, 'This ain't Stewarts no more if that's what you're looking for...it's 'The Brass Monkey'.

There's no getting away from it.

Footnote:
In other news, today I secured the main objective of my visit to Scotland relating to the letting of our flat, and also managed to sneek into Old College (pictured above) my law faculty alma mater and find Arclight (who even blipped yours truly!) in her basement office for a long overdue and all too brief catch up. Next time we'll plan it properly with her and Alf!