Edinburgh, J.K. Rowling, and Me

When I’m dropped off near the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, it’s raining. A soft and unrelenting rain that looks as if it’ll last all day.

I’ve got three hours before I’m to meet up again with my host at the Scottish National Galleries—she’s off to the dentist while I’m off to explore. From what I’ve read about it, the Galleries houses a good collection and I’m looking forward to seeing the impressionists; Monet, Cezanne, Seurat, Daubigny. Happy enough to take some time to do something more fun than the dentist while in the city, and having not been in some time to the museum, my host also wants to look at art. She herself is an artist. Therefore, our afternoon appointment seems a perfect arrangement of interests and time.

I bid her thank you and goodbye and start off directly with a visit to St. Giles Cathedral.

It’s only just barely May and the tourists are already trickling in.

“You think this is bad, wait until the summer,” the man at Scott’s Monument tells me later. “There’s hardly room to move.”

 

I, in this moment a tourist myself, have to adjust to the sharing of sites, to the sharing of streets, to the impatience I suddenly feel while waiting for that picture-taker to get out of my photograph. How the country life has made me miserly.

But it’s not the country’s fault.

It’s a bit the rain, a bit the getting up early, a bit the tightness in my knee that has increased over the last several days and is worrying at me, and a bit the crunch I feel to do, see, go in the short amount of time I have. I feel this and tell myself to stop it. You old cranky-poo (as my grandfather might have said with a twinkle in his eyes if he’d been along with me). I tell myself to slow down, to be nice, to appreciate, to enjoy, to be glad that others are out enjoying their day too.

While knowing this is good advice, still I rush off from the Cathedral without hardly even appreciating the stained glass, the arched ceilings, the altars, the organ. Rush up the street to see the statue of Greyfriars Bobby. As if my day is a scavenger hunt and the only way to win is by checking off the items on my list as quickly as possible.

There’s a smattering of people hovering at the bit of sidewalk where the statue stands getting their photos made with Bobby, waiting in line to have their picture taken with Bobby. I glance at the watchful, bronze pup almost without seeing it, waiting just long enough for that lady’s elbow to clear the frame of my camera screen before snapping my shot.

Declared as “the most loved object in Edinburgh” by the sign on the fence behind it, the statue is of a Skye Terrier named Bobby who was said to have stayed faithfully by his owner’s grave in the Greyfriars churchyard for fourteen years. Having gotten a picture, I leave Bobby behind without even saying goodbye or touching his nose for luck which the sign goes on to say is “hokum that is damaging the bronze and should be discouraged.”

Across the street in the nearby Kirkyard, there’s a tour group being told in Spanish about Bobby’s own gravestone (which the tour guide is blocking). The inscription, when I can finally zoom in to see it, reads: Let his loyalty & devotion be a lesson to us all.

I’m sure there’s a whole day’s worth of reflecting in that sentence alone, but I’m much too pressed for time to think about it now. I’m much too closed in by hordes of tourists.

When another large group comes from around the Kirk and threatens to swarm down upon me like a plague of locusts, I hightail it away.

Edinburgh is quite walkable. Even in the rain, even with a temperamental knee. The buildings are interesting, the city lighting under the lampshade of rain is in hues of brown and grey, the overall feeling is one of friendliness and welcome rather than austerity. Let that, too, be a lesson to me, the old cranky poo.

My next stop is only half a block down the street.

The Elephant House, a tea and coffee house and restaurant (as billed by the menu) asserts that its backroom with its view of Edinburgh Castle was used by J.K. Rowling when she wrote many of her first Harry Potter novels. Alexander McCall Smith was also said to have café-d there. The menu says he “frequented” the café. However, I do not believe this for one single second. McCall Smith has written some ungodly number of books, like a million and two or so. Long ago I realized that in order to be so prolific he must only ever write. He must write at the expense of eating, sleeping, drinking, walking, or even existing in any other form or manner.

J.K. Rowling may well have written from the back room, but Alexander McCall Smith most certainly could not have frequented such a place or eighty of his books would not have been written.

His books exist, ergo!

Nevertheless, whether the café is making false claims or not, I’ve put a star by the listing in my notebook and stand some time in line to be seated. As I wait, watching others come in behind me, watching other being seated ahead of me, I wonder again what it means to chase a bit of fame, what it means to be here at all. What would I say if I bumped into Rowling? Or McCall Smith (even though of course he never leaves his writing desk)? What would I want said to me if someone bumped into me at a café I frequented if my name and face were so well known?

What’s the Golden Rule? Ask of others what you would want asked of yourself?

But what is that?

When my turn comes, to my delight I get the front window seat I’d been hoping to secure, and settle in. A girl sits next to me and while we wait for a staff member to come take our orders we chitchat a little. Of course, she’s a tourist too. An American originally from Arizona and more recently from Los Angeles. “Are you a Harry Potter fan?” she asks me. Of course, she is. In the course of our conversation, I find out that she’s taking a week to travel around and that it’s not her first time to Europe.

As we wait even longer, as we make our orders, I feel I talk too much, about writing, about myself, about the Scottish rain, about the plot of Harry Potter, how I’d recently read the series all through to see how well Rowling had done with all the threads (quite well, in fact) (as if my critique matters) (“I’m a writer myself,” I say, and it sounds so arrogant, so inflated, so false that I wish I could take back the words the instant they leave my mouth). My morning funk has quite gone (“quite” is apparently a Britishism that I’ve picked up and use quite frequently now as well as parentheticals).

How nice it is to look out at the rain through the glass. How nice it is to see people in the restaurant opposite like goldfish in a bowl. How nice it is to have crossed off three of my list’s boxes already. 

Afraid I’m being annoyingly self-focused, I ask my café companion a few more questions. She answers. And then we fall silent. Our drinks arrive.

“Cheers,” I say, lifting my cup.

“Oh. Cheers,” she says.

We sit next to each other in another silence. From the outside we must look like we’ve come together. But we haven’t.  

I sip my coffee and think obliquely of how relationships could be assumed and mistaken, think there could be a story there.

Outside, separated from me only by the thin pane of glass, a woman poses as her friend snaps her picture. Suddenly, I wonder just how clearly I am seen, another goldfish in a different bowl, and if I should make a face, give the thumbs-up sign, or a V for victory, for peace. Wish for a moment I were the exuberant type of person who would photo-bomb with glee.  

“Do you ever wonder how many people’s photos you get into during your lifetime?” I ask my café companion. “I feel as if I should be posing right now.” She makes some relevant remark and then we sit lost again in our own thoughts as the rain comes harder down.

The rain comes down.  

My coffee is cold.

My coffee is gone.

The café has a bustling air. A touristy air. Maybe the back room is quieter. Maybe it’s not the café with the hurried feel, but rather me. I’d like to sit and write something beautiful in the notebook I’ve pulled out and thumbed through, but what would I say? That relationships seen through a window can be assumed to exist but that they aren’t necessarily real? Instead, I check off the boxes for St. Giles Cathedral, Greyfriars Bobby, The Elephant House. 

Scott’s Monument is still on my list to do and it’s the one thing, for whatever strange reason, I’ve most wanted to visit on this day. So, noting the time, I pay my bill and take a quick trip to the restroom.

As I pass through, I glance at the filled back room, but if J.K. herself or Alexander himself are there, I don’t see them for not looking, for not wanting to stare at all the ones sitting in that room, not wanting to be so stared at myself.

Doing as I’d been told by the cashier, I take the second door and thereby enter a little hallway.

This little hallway leading to the bathrooms is covered in writing, a mural of handwriting, a kaleidoscope of graffiti. A bit surprised by it since it doesn’t quite fit the décor, I go into an available restroom and close myself in. I stand for a moment and stare. The walls of the tiny bathroom are also completely textured with notes—all notes to J.K. Rowling.

Thank you for the magic.

You taught me how to read.

Thanks for H.P.

Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

I believe in magic.

H.P. saved my life.

Thanks for making my childhood an adventure.

The notes overlay each other, some are quotes from the books, some are claims of magic by the note-writers, most are a thank you of some kind. They are signed by many and come from all over the world.

How strange, I think as I leave the bathroom and then leave the café, that the most impressing part of my café stop, the most impressive part of my day in Edinburgh so far would be a bathroom. 

I wonder if Rowling knows. I wonder if she’s seen those notes for herself. Has she been back to The Elephant House since those early days of writing? Had she really written while there? Had she ever really been there at all? Should I send her a Twitter message with a photo of the wall? But really, who am I?

For apparently there’s nothing like a bathroom wall of notes to give a person (aka me) a tiny existential crisis.

Who am I? Who am I? What am I? Who am I?

As I walk away, glancing back once or twice, I wonder how it’d feel to have notes written like that to me.

What must it be like to have written something that impacted so many people?

What must it be like to have written a story that so many people read?

What must it be like to have been the one to give magic to so many?

Even if only the magic of reading. And what an even if that is! For the magic of reading is a magic that is real. That’s a magic that is transferable. That’s a magic that withstands the test of time and witch hunts and fears. That’s a powerful magic indeed.

I walk through the lightening rain with tourists behind me. I hear an announcement rise into the air from Waverly Station, but can’t tell which train it’s calling, which platform, which hour. I gaze down upon East Princes St Gardens.

Then there I am at Scott’s Monument—a tribute to another writer, so very different from walls and walls of thank yous written in the hallways and bathrooms of a café and restaurant. This is a gothic spire built in the 1800s of which the pamphlet I’m given states that Charles Dickens said, “I am sorry to report the Scott Monument a failure. It is like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground.” The pamphlet (by The City of Edinburgh Council) goes on to say that whatever the opinion, “the Scott Monument remains today as the largest memorial in the world dedicated to a writer.”

I pay the entry fee and climb my way up the 287 steps. When I’m about halfway, the sky clears, the sun comes out, the day brightens. By the top, it’s as if the rain never happened at all. There is all of Edinburgh below me. There is the Firth of Forth. There is Arthur’s Seat. There is Edinburgh’s Folly. There is the National Galleries. I check my clock. I still have forty-five minutes before my meeting up time with my host.   

While I take my pictures and look all around, I don’t feel the monument the way I felt the bathroom notes. That’s weird, right? Isn’t a monument grander than The Elephant House? Maybe it’s just that I haven’t read much of Sir Walter Scott.

How would he have felt about this monument to his honor?

But look, there, the gleaming of light on water. There, the gorse flowers brightening the foot of 

Arthur’s Seat with yellow. There, the changing clouds above Edinburgh Castle.

The glories of writers gone from my thoughts like the rain and now only thinking of the glory of the day, I make my way back, grateful for my knees, even my troubled, bothered knee. Two-thirds down, I stop in the little museum room with its stained glass, historical notes, and the wooden plaques naming all of Scott’s works—numerous, but maybe not as numerous as Alexander McCall Smith’s. 

On one of the benches, two tourists sit talking in a language I don’t speak, probably catching their breath before proceeding onward and upward. One of the site’s guardians (I’m not sure what the proper title for a monument worker is) is also sitting there. After the tourists leave, he gets up and begins to talk with me. Shows me pictures from his phone of what the monument looks like lit up at night, what the pathways beneath us look like at Christmas time, during the busy summers. He’s looking for a photo to show me of Glencoe which he says I absolutely must visit while in Scotland.

“I hope I’m not boring you with all this,” he says, never finding the picture he’d hoped to find, but having shared many others instead while telling me of Edinburgh, the monument, the history, of Scotland, of his family, and of Scott. “He’s brought in a lot of money for Scotland,” he says, and it’s a phrase that sticks with me as I finish my descent. It’s a phrase I forget as I get a little snack and wile away the remaining time before going over to the Scottish National Galleries and the artwork that awaits me there.

My host, Titian, da Vinci, Raphael, Botticelli, and El Greco are some of the old friends I meet before I find my way back to Room 18 Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and the pieces I’d hoped to see. I’m not disappointed. There are two by Monet showing his mastery of water, a series by Degas which I hadn’t even known to expect, a mountain scene by Cezanne, a charming village view by Pissarro, and an Orchard done by van Gogh.

The hour ticks by and then it’s time to go. After we’ve left the Galleries, walked around a bit, and had a bite to eat, my host drives me up to the top of Arthur’s Seat and then drives us home again through a spectacular rainbow.

As the miles lengthen between us and Edinburgh, we listen to the radio and if I think I think of what awaits me in my little room. For there is my computer and the novel I’m working on. You cranky poo, you existentialist, I think, if I think, You don’t need a monument, you don’t need a bathroom filled with thank yous, you simply need to finish your book.  

 

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