My Own Private Minamata

29 December 1999

The anticyclone continues uninterrupted, and today is yet again glorious. Cloudless blue sky enwraps the thick thick frosty ground, ice crystals gleaming and glittering like false diamonds. Yesterday was personally glorious also, in which your hero managed to exit his flat, enter a pub, buy a pint, and sit down and drink it. With no anxiety attack. With no sense of everyone in the place talking about him, and threatening to beat him up. Oh, I did hear words that sounded a bit like "gay" and "bastard" and "kill the cunt", but reality thankfully penetrated to the extent that I realised it was the football on the telly they were discussing.

This was in Robbies Bar, notable for its picture windows. You can drink and watch the world go by, like on the continent, but indoors and warm, like in Scotland. And then came the Great Idea!! Why not climb Calton Hill, and see more of the sky than anywhere else in the world? Why not? No reason!! Let's do it!

I should point out to the stranger to these lands that Edinburgh boasts not only fine buildings, but a hill and a mini-mountain right in its centre. Unusual, and very, very beautiful. Calton Hill was duly climbed, with half an eccie gobbed on the way, the better to enjoy the sensations. (I'd put one in my pocket for emotional emergencies. And to any Drug Squad who might be reading this, there are none left in the house, and I didn't write this anyway; it was an impostor.)

What I'd forgotten in my happiness was that Calton Hill doesn't just boast the finest of skyscapes, it also offers heart-leaping panoramas of my city. Gaping with joy at the interplay of sun on brown stone and still-light shadows in between, I even spoke to a man and woman climbing the path I'd just come up. They had their backs to the view. "You really should take a moment to look at this," I ventured, chemically. "Gee - we've just got here, and I thought it was like this all the time," the young man replied, Californially.

Then as the afternoon progressed, I realised the stark truth. Not one person on the hill was local! Everyone was a foreigner! Obviously here for the millennium, as was a noisy fairground in the street below. This wasn't a city today, it was a theme park. Back to Leith and reality.

Nervous, very nervous, I entered the Port o Leith Bar, my second home. Home also these days to the grotesques and wicked fairies who can and do cause so much harm in my sadness. But there were none of them, doubtless still sleeping off last night's poisons. "How was your Christmas?" asked Gwen the barmaid. "Not very good," I ventured, about to elaborate slightly. "Didn't think it would be," she interrupted. "Don't know why I asked. Bet you were hibernating at home, with drugs." Well, she got the first part right.

A young man sat next to me and started chatting. It turned out he was a former pupil, now aged 39. (Many years ago your author taught for a little while.) We chatted about not a great deal, as a quarter of a century is not a dinner-break. I'm sure we'll talk more later, but then I was more concerned about hiding my chemical condition. Standards. Musn't disillusion the young :)

This morning's People's Century was about environmental destruction, which apparently was first brought to notice in Minamata in Japan, where everybody got mercury poisoning from a chemical plant. (Chemicals seem to be a recurring theme today.)

Glancing round my living room I saw waste and pollution everywhere. Wine bottles, fag packets, meal containers and crockery stretched to the very horizon. Collapse was imminent. So, manfully I searched out a rubbish bag, and started filling it up. By the end of the programme, which was saving the whale, I'd got about one inch cleared. Depth, that is. All the edibles have gone, but letters, bills and magazines remain where they've been for almost a year.

You see, it's so easy to deal with a spoon in an empty tin can. You preserve the spoon for washing some time, and discard the can. But letters need reading. They might, just might, be important. It's an ordeal beyond words. Maybe next summer.

Ta-ra. Off out again. But no plans.