'Rightly or wrongly it is easy to love a city with its messy bits hidden - 'aw fur coat and nae knickers', as Weegies like to say'
"It's just weird" a friend says as we stride down the grey boulevard under a angry-looking sky. "Edinburgh always makes me feel unfeasibly nostalgic. And I've never even lived here".
But misty Edinburgh somehow does that to people. I did live here, and visit all the time, but am constantly suffused with a melancholy sense of something lost which I never get passing through, say, Stoke Newington. "Oh there's where I stayed out that magical night with Alex and Catriona" I'll think, evocatively, even though I saw Alex last week and Catriona is standing over there. It's no surprise David Nicholls set much of his bittersweet masterpiece One Day here.
It is beautiful, but Cheltenham is beautiful and rarely makes people sigh at the mention of its name. It's old, but so is St Albans. Edinburgh is special.
Perhaps because it is a walking town. There is no other way to get about sensibly. Taxis have to skirt the tram works, which have now been laid down for over 75 years; buses only go to mysterious destinations like South Gyle, bicycles respond well to neither gradients nor cobblestones. So you are forced to get about it the way Alexander Fleming got about it, and David Hume and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, marking every step and stone.
It's the way she's built, too. As the writer Nick Harkaway pointed out, Edinburgh has a great hole in the middle between the old town and the new that you have to bridge every day, hopping across the chasm. It has darkness and that sinister brooding castle; twisty wynds and dripping underground streets. It is hard not to let the dank walls soak into you, the worn-away steps of countless feet of hundreds of years make you feel old and rooted too.
And the smell: smell is the last thing to go when one is sans eyes sans teeth sans everything; it has a stronger effect on emotional memory than all the rest, which is why people surreptitiously sniff their children's crayons.The yeasty brewing heady scent is the first thing most people remark on alighting at Waverly station, and it recalls every moment you have ever spent here from the second you disembark the Great Western.
Local novelist Ian Rankin adds that because of the design of Edinburgh, like Paris - another city of the heart - all the lovely stuff is in the middle. It's not like London with its huggermugger of rich and poor, street by street, nor Glasgow with its tower blocks cramming every vista. It has its ugly banlieues (even if Irvine Welsh's Leith now has three Michelin starred restaurants) tucked away on the outskirts. Rightly or wrongly it is easy to love a city with its messy bits hidden - 'aw fur coat and nae knickers', as Weegies like to say.
And you cross the rocks and the railway tracks into the New Town, which has claims to be the world's first, faltering steps into a way of living as planned and designed and pleasant, rather than scrabbling into life as it fell.
The grand, iron-railinged terraces of the New Town can be intimidating - but they are touching, too; in the kindness and generosity of their spaciousness and light, and that huge, wonderful, overwhelming promise of the Enlightenment: that out of the chaos and Rabelaisian hurly-burly (the Old Town is still where much of the fun takes place), order will inevitably come. Edinburgh's past, like our own, makes a promise to the future.
Jenny Colgan appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as JT Colgan, author of the Doctor Who novel Dark Horizon
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