rhythmaning | Walking and Talking (Reply)

Last week, I found myself walking in Edinburgh. This isn’t that shocking – I walk a lot, and I live in Edinburgh – but I walked further than I have done recently, and through parts that I haven’t been in for a while. Two days running, I was in the same area.

I had arranged to see someone in their home in Morningside, overlooking the Braid Hills, in the south of the city. (I perceive Edinburgh in reverse: I live in the north, at the bottom of a long hill; south is up the hill – and in my mental picture of Edinburgh, south is at the top, north is at the bottom. I am not alone in this: ten years ago, there was an exhibition at the Collective Gallery, and the artist had drawn a picture of Edinburgh that mapped out the important places to them: it had north at the bottom. I have a copy of it, somewhere.)

I hadn’t intended to walk all the way; it just kind of happened.

I headed up the hill. I had to stop at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society: the previous day, I had left without paying; I meant to stop off in the evening, but I forgot, and I woke in the middle of the night, remembering. I felt embarrassed. It was a small bill – a coffee and a tea (ha! and you thought I was pissed!) – but still.

It was a glorious day, a clear, deep blue sky and a warm autumn sun. The sun shone in my eyes.

From Queen St, I walked to the West End, to Lothian Road, to pick up a bus. I had half an hour until I was due at the Braid, and I wasn’t sure which buses went to Morningside. (It wouldn’t have been hard to find out.) And I thought I had plenty of time; so I instead of waiting for a bus – any bus – I decided to walk.

It took me forty minutes or so – I was a little late – through Tollcross, past the Meadows, Bruntsfield and then Morningside. It was busy – though mid-morning, there seemed to be school children everywhere.

It was good to be walking – a fair way, four miles, and an hour or so in total. It was so beautiful to be out, moving, stretching – hurrying.

* * *

I was meeting a contact to talk about freelancing. I realised very quickly that he had little to share with me – he worked in a very specific, esoteric market – but he was a very interesting guy, and we had a fascinating conversation for an hour or so.

He had been an equity analyst in the City for some prestigious stockbrokers and merchant banks, rising to be managing director of two of the largest institutions in the City. A couple of years ago, he had decided to semi-retire, and focus on training senior financial people in communication skills. (It was the training connection that someone had spotted and put me in touch with him.) He had contracts training in London and Stockholm – a couple of days a month in each city – and he was also joint managing director of a merchant bank. In Ukraine – which took two weeks of his time each month. It didn’t sound like semi-retirement to me – though he said it was less work than the sixteen hour days he had put in for twenty years.

We talked about the various things he had done, and how he had wanted to focus on training; he told me his story – how his MBA in 1982 had lead him to London, where being tri-lingual in English, French and German in pre- and post-Big Bang (the deregulation of the City’s financial institutions in 1986 – exactly twenty years ago when we met) had been very useful, since his firm was taken over by a Swiss bank. We shared an acquaintances in common – a friend of mine from university who had worked for the same firm; he must have been K’s boss at one point. (Last I heard, she was married to the brother of a Scottish duke.)

He had many flats in Edinburgh – he had invested each of his annual bonuses into property. I couldn’t help working out what he might be worth (the flats alone would generate four times my previous salary). His own house was tastefully decorated, but somewhat soulless, maybe because he was there for only a week or so a month. It was very tidy, everything put away; it felt like a show-home.

We also talked about the interest and challenge in running a bank in Ukraine. He had only taken the job because a good friend of his had asked for his help; the friend, who is the other joint-MD, lives in the Bahamas. (I presume that is “lives in” as in “rarely home”.) The bank uses Ukrainian nationals who have been educated in the USA, which seemed like a neat idea – avoiding language problems.

He was a genuinely interesting guy – I really enjoyed our conversation, and he seemed very happy to talk, despite his leaving for Kiev the next day.

* * *

I wasn’t in such a hurry on the way back. The sun had moved around, the shadows had changed, but it was still glorious, quite warm and good to be out. I had my small pocket camera, and I stopped frequently to take pictures – of the building and the shadows, mostly. It took me twice as long to walk home as it had to walk there.

The view from the Braid; a Morningside palm tree; a Morningside tenement

Bruntsfield tenements

A tenement niche

I walked back as far as Bruntsfield, back the way I had gone, and then I cut across the Meadows, a large park near the university. I walked under the whale’s jawbones that mark one of the paths. By the university I bumped into Ms Z, and we chatted – we had already arranged to meet up for lunch in a couple weeks anyway. She spoke about rebuilding her flat, and how she wants to sell it in a couple of years; it seemed like a lot of work to me – getting a flat just so, and then moving on to another one. I really wouldn’t make a property developer. Houses are for living in.

I went past the Museum of Scotland, the sun catching its honeyed-stone curves, and then I walked by St Giles Cathedral on the Mile. I walked around the cathedral, staring at the sky: it has an open spire like a crown. The Mile itself was closed whilst they dug up the street – though it seemed like some very major digging going on.

The Museum of Scotland

St Giles Cathedral

Colonnade, Parliament Sq

Shadows, Drummond Place

Nearly home, hungry (it was now mid-afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast) but happy, turned into Summerbank – a small street, recently sealed at one end so cars can’t get through. It is lined with plane trees, and without cars to sweep them away, the pavement and the street were inches deep in orange and yellow leaves. I turned five, enjoyed a few moments kicking up the leaves, which swirled around my legs.

* * *

The next day I was meeting RP, a former colleague; she lives in Bruntsfield, and we had arranged to meet in Starbucks there, so I walked back again; only three miles, this time.

It wasn’t such a good day – nice, pleasant, but not stunning: there was high cloud. I walked up the hill, up the Mound, and along George IV Bridge. The windows of the museum had amazing reflections from the Central Library; I stopped and took some pictures before heading across the Meadows.

Starbucks was busy, so we went to a café around the corner where R ate pancakes and maple syrup.

It was good to see R; we were never close friends, but had always got on very well, and I like her company. She is about four months pregnant (I am not sure I would have noticed if it hadn’t been the first thing she had said). When she left where we had worked, back in April, she started a new job for a university a couple of weeks later; it had been fine until last week, when her boss had decided not put the brakes on the change programme she had been brought in to look after: so her raison d’etre for being there – her very job – was up in the air, and she was feeling very, very frustrated. She thought she’d work until her maternity leave started, though the way she was feeling, she was tempted just to resign now.

R is an interesting person: there is a lot to her. She is studying to be a psychotherapist, which means that she has to be in therapy herself, and we talked about that for quite a while: what it actually means, what it does for her, what difference it makes. I am not sure that I “get it”, but I have other friends for whom therapy is very useful, and I do find it interesting (if not for me; not now, not yet).

It also means R can ask some quite challenging questions, and she was probing me on what I was doing and what I wanted to do; I felt some discomfort, which is probably a good thing, though I wasn’t wholly, completely open with her (not without client confidentiality!).

* * *

I walked back a different way again, down to Tollcross and then cutting through the Grassmarket and back up to George IV Bridge, once more being seduced by the honey sandstone of the museum, before heading to Princes St to hunt out some decent jeans.

Architectural decoration, a Methodist church in Bruntsfield