I
rounded the corner and saw George Street in all its splendour. I couldn’t believe I was back in
Edinburgh after all these years. It was as if I’d never been away. All the old familiar landmarks
were
there – the Scott Monument, Princes Street, my old office on St Giles' Street where I sat for ten years perched like
an eagle in his eyrie looking down a sheer hundred feet onto the glass roof of
the subterranean Waverley Station. On
my first morning back, I could see that there were new phenomena too – the most expensive trams in the world,
snaking along on their tracks all the way to the airport, and the beggars, of
whom there was seemingly one in every shop doorway on Princes Street. I wondered about a collective noun for them
and came up with an ‘explosion of beggars’.
There were Bulgarians and Romanians and for all I knew, Bohemians,
Transylvanians and Serbo-Croats. One man
played a violin with a His Master’s Voice horn stuck to the end of it for
greater amplification. An elderly woman squeezed
a concertina, badly. Then there were the young men, seated on the pavement,
wrapped in filthy blankets, holding up scraps of corrugated cardboard containing
some scrawled and pitiful narrative, dogs perched in abject misery on their
laps. I had forgotten. I had simply forgotten.
My
return to honest labour happened in such a whirl, I could scarcely comprehend
it. I picked up the telephone at home, thinking it would be the girl from the double-glazing firm that rings me
almost every day and with whom I am almost on intimate terms, but, instead, a
disembodied male Scottish voice said ‘Hello, it’s Hamish here, we’ve got a
client who might be interested in discussing a role with you. Would you care to come and see him?’ I would, and did, and managed to speak a form
of coherent English during a ninety-minute interview, as a result of which I
was offered a nine-month contract, three days a week, with ‘extensive travel,
all over Scotland.’
At my time of life, three days a week is almost de trop, but I
gratefully accepted the post. My
thinking was along the lines that, at long last, after two years in exile, save
for a few desultory days of work in Glasgow earlier this year, I was once more
of some use to somebody. My mother had said: ‘You’re the only person I
know who, having retired, is anxious to get back into work.’ As the last two years had comprised dog-walking,
leaf-sweeping, playing tennis and badminton, cooking and stamp collecting, it
was no wonder I was ready to go back to the maelstrom of office life. And so, on a
cold and blustery November day, I rounded the corner and saw George Street in all its splendour. However, in order to get there, I had
the dubious pleasure of climbing once more onto the top deck of a double-decker
bus in the dark and in the freezing cold, there being no reasonable all-day parking in Edinburgh,
unless one were to use the local NCP car parks, whereupon one is divested of
eighteen pounds per day, enough to buy a reasonable meal in a fancy restaurant,
of which Edinburgh abounds. I chose to
drive into Musselburgh and take a bus from there. The journey time is an hour each way so,
setting off from home at seven in the morning, I would get home at seven in the
evening.
That was nothing compared to my
single greatest fear, that my brain might have atrophied with so little recent
use. Watch this space for future postings to find out if it
has.
