Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

Ducks, dossers and rocking horses

K has her first birthday next week, so last weekend we went en famille to Edinburgh's Grassmarket to visit a toyshop called Pinocchio to find her presents. J's mother found the shop on the web and suggested it might be a good place to buy a wooden rocking horse, which we were to buy on her behalf.

Unexpectedly, it was quite an illuminating experience, in ways I hadn't even thought about before we set off. What we found made me re-think some of my ideas about Edinburgh and made me realise some of them no longer match up to its modern reality.

It was strangely bizarre to be on such a wholesome errand in a part of Edinburgh that I remember from my childhood as full of doss houses, rough pubs and desperate, homeless people. Today's Grassmarket is so very different to the place I carried in my head for so long. Thirty years ago this was not the place to come if you were in the market for hand-made French wooden puppets.

Long, long ago it was where public hangings used to take place, and the place still carries something of that atmosphere. The Salvation Army had an outpost nearby and homeless men, often alcoholics, with red, bulbous features distorted by drink, used to loll about in the central square gulping 60% booze from bottles in brown paper bags. I remember being afraid of them as we hurried through on the way to more salubrious parts of town, I don't exactly know why, since the people they hurt most were themselves. They never took any notice of me. I think even then I was scared by the knowledge that homelessness, alcoholism, though I didn't know the words then, were things that really could happen to people.

According to my mother, one time we were walking through the area, I stopped and asked her: "Mummy, why is that man asleep on the pavement?"

I can't believe Edinburgh's homelessness problem has disappeared, but the tramps have certainly all vanished from the Grassmarket, at least there were none about on the sunny Saturday morning when we visited. The doss houses are gone, in their place boutique city hotels that serve complimentary peanuts with low-alcohol mixer drinks. The rougher second-hand clothes shops are now vintage clothing outlets.

I shouldn't complain too much. We found a wooden rocking horse and enormous Edouard le Canard soft toy from Moulin Roty for K. Edouard told me when we got home that he would like to stay in my bedroom for the week or so before K's birthday. I find him comforting.

Posted 27 March 2007 20:26

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