Invisible

But the new normal.

In 1967 I went with my dad for a holiday in Ireland. It was a lovely week, driving from Belfast to Killarney, Cork then Dublin. My young self was fascinated by the daftness of the Blarney Stone, the horse-drawn hay wagons, the horse market, the loch-side country house hotel we ended up in one night instead of the usual B&B, Dad driving the wrong way on a multi-lane one-way street in Dublin, going to the Abbey Theatre.

But one negative image shocked that same young self. For the first time in my life I came across beggars, mostly women with small children, sitting on a bridge over the Liffey, and was shaken not just by their presence but by the way people simply walked past as if they were invisible.

Almost 50 years later, here we are in Edinburgh, just the same.