WILDGOOSE

EDINBURGH HIGH POINT: A (near mountain), just a short (if steep) walk from the city centre. Here the wind almost scorches the bustle from your ears. I say ‘almost’ because with a westerly wind one catches an audio-glimpse of Edinburgh’s new soundtrack. Gone are the wavering tones of the bagpipe, like some love-sick adolescent boy with his voice half broken, struggling to make poetry but in fact losing all meaning to tonal rasp and deviation, not so much a tune as a random sequence of unrelated notes. But better that, much better that than what has taken its place. For in its stead are the idiotic sounds of amplified pan pipe music. Nothing could be more incongruous amidst this austere Presbyterian grandeur than a group of central American troubadours masquerading as peruvians in full native American animal-skin costumes, huffing valiantly into their pipes in an apparently vain attempt to subdue the taped backing track that plays at setting eleven, while their ‘squaws’ hit the tourists with overpriced CDs. The more you are assaulted by this noise -even on Salisbury Crags, the more you want to reach for the conquistador’s sabre you wished rattled upon your hip.

But Edinburgh, full of tourists and festival goers still holds its head up. It is a fair and cosmopolitan city.  There are only a few signs of the Morningside spinsters, for they have retreated to their stronghold Jenners, the anachronistic department store just off Prince’s Street where everything you buy is comfortably below the knee. These spinsters seem to have been superseded by thin, pale, grungy students. Although I expect even these grungy students will eventually turn into Morningside’s repressive conservatives, because is it not in the nature of things to revert?  I hope so; if only see the routing of the panpipe by the indigenous bagpipe.