ALONE AGAIN, NATIONALLY

It was a feverishly hot and humid day in early July. I sat on two slats of wood, looking down on the ribbon of road that winds past Arthur's Seat and on into the Old Town itself. A pair of young lovers finished kissing and canoodling and meandered off, hand-in-hand, in the direction of St Leonards, and left me their seat. I was quite alone, as I had been all morning, alone and rather lonely. I say alone, but, to be fair, there was a gang of roofers sunbathing on the roof of a tenement about 200 metres away. With their bare torsos, they looked like a phalanx of common seals on the rocks at Eyemouth. The roofers and I were all cooled by a sprightly, and welcome, westerly breeze that tugged at my forelock as I gazed out over the vocanic plug across the valley. I tried to recall what the geography teacher at the Grammar School had taught me about glacial erosion and I came to the conclusion that he had taught me very little, which is what he managed with most of his subject. He used to throw chalk and, occasionally, his blackboard rubber, at me and other miscreants and occasionally he would land one square on my ear-hole. If he was still alive now, which I happen know he is not, he would have been behind bars and I would be sitting on a tidy sum in compensation for being terrified half out of my wits. I shuddered and turned my mind to more pleasant matters. A pair of joggers wheezed by, fifty feet below me, their gasps plainly audible during lulls in the traffic flow. The Balmoral Hotel clock showed twenty past one on the face that was visible to me, but I was unclear whether that was the face that shows a faster time in order to help travellers catch their trains.
I reflected on the fact that I was not far from the terminus of the old Innocent railway line, the first railway branch line in Scotland, from Dalkeith to Edinburgh, a coal line that was originally rope-hauled. Apart from a pair of Meadow Pipits and later a brace of House Martins and a Yorkshire Terrier, I had no company to speak of.