Steffi, Lynda and I spent much of yesterday sunbaking on the gravestone of Jean Grant, 43, of East Lothian. According to her obituary she had a "charitable disposition acompanied with genuine and exemplary virtue (which) bespeaks the Christian hope of an everlasting felicity, to sooth the sorrows and to animate the soul of her surviving relations and friends." I'm sure she would be happy to know her table-shaped gravestone brought happiness to three backpackers. What I love about Edinburgh is its sense of a layered, complicated history - that and its setting of course. Apparently there are old road and laneways buried under the Royal Mile, a street that runs down from the castle. Here and there around the city are plaques to people lynched on a dyers pole. Streets have names like Fleshmarket, Candlemaker's Row,
... read more