Tears to cheers in Edinburgh

It wasn’t dark yet, with the late winter sun not even halfway down over Edinburgh. Tourists on the Royal Mile — friends, couples, parents with children holding their hands — were ambling about, some losing their way in bylanes on taking a turn. Locals meanwhile were spending just another day on a cobbled road that joins a castle to a palace. The first creatures of the night filtered in. At 3 am, they would totter out when the pubs shut, filling the sidewalks with the murmur of warm, drawn-out goodbyes.
But in the midst of it all, a woman walked alone. Her arms were folded against her chest to ward off the wind. Her back was bent slightly as she turned the inclined corner around Starbucks. And her eyes were filled with tears that belied a grief that no conscientious person could ever wish upon someone made of flesh and blood. She didn’t seem as if she was from the city, and after she turned the corner, she was gone.

We’ll never know what made that woman cry like no one was watching her. Her sadness, anyway, seemed personal. What we could assume is that the city we find ourselves in sometimes dictates our feelings, as it can be with Edinburgh, a place filled with tales of soldiers, writers, bootleggers and grave diggers, where emotions pour out of people as if our hearts are oak barrels and our feelings ageing wine.

So let’s trace an imaginary path for that woman hoping that somewhere along the way she found a measure of happiness for her barrel. Let’s take her around the Starbucks corner to Arthur’s Seat, a dormant volcano that dominates the landscape in the heart of Scotland’s capital.

It’s shaped somewhat like a lion resting on its knees and the climb to the summit, the lion’s head, takes a while. But the view is breathtaking, peppered with snow-topped hills all around. Parks that look as small as putting greens are nestled in between them. And the foreboding castle sits in the middle on another volcanic rock. Below it, the Victorian and Georgian houses, the modern-day shops and supermarkets, the churches with only their spires visible, shaped like upturned cones made of iron and stone, and the rest of normal life in the city including cars and people all give way to the still blue sea down south.

It’s a sight that hopefully made that woman feel better since moments like these ease our troubles, making them disappear for a while like the sun does when it sets for the day, as it did now in front of her eyes.

So with a spring in her step she walked down the southern end of Arthur’s Seat towards Hollyrood Palace, past the lake filled with swans. The Royal Mile lay in front of her again, dressed by now in the colours of the night. This end of the road is lonelier, so she made her way towards the castle, closer to where the bustle is, turning into a cobbled bylane, lost, but finally less sad. Two pubs lay to the right. The first one’s more raucous from the outside, more for binge-drinking students than for her. So she walked into the second one, The Banshee Labyrinth, before getting further lost inside.

Edinburgh once had an underground civilisation that’s now vanished over the years. That’s where its tales of bootleggers and grave diggers often come from. Believe it or not, but the distillation of whisky was almost completely banned in the city at one point. So enterprising mafia bosses of the 18th century ran a racket where their henchmen hoodwinked the authorities, distilling whisky illicitly where no one could find them — underground. They shared communal space sometimes with people who’d secretly dig up bodies from their graves and sell them, still fresh, to men of medicine who needed human meat to practise surgery on. These cramped, maze-like spaces in the nether regions of the city have also served as hideouts or dungeons at various points in time. But today, some of them house pubs, like The Banshee Labyrinth for example, where a gentlemanly bouncer ushered the woman inside.

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It’s nearing 3 am now. The woman’s been co-opted by a table of locals, laughing with them without any tears left inside. The pints of beer have kicked in a while ago, when someone orders a round of ‘Black Death’ at the bar. It’s a shot made of one part each of Wild Shots, sambuca, tequila and absinthe, and the locals themselves usually steer clear of that. But they all down it in a moment of bravado. After that, even the best of us would totter our way out and once at the sidewalk, her new friends look out for the woman, concerned about whether she can make her way back to her room alone. And once assured that she can stay safely on her feet, they start walking her to a taxi at the Royal Mile, making plans together for the next day, and filling the bylane with the murmur of warm, drawn-out goodbyes.