Second blog post

Rosevale Guest House Kilmaur Rd

 

It is Saturday night here at the Rosevale Guest House and I am seated behind my laptop perched upon a wee, very shaky little stool. As I blog, I am also engaged in a scotch tasting session. To my left, in a thistle mug I bought at the thrift shop, is a 1993 Pittyvaich single malt. To my right, in a toothbrush glass, is a 1988 Tullibardine.

 

I can’t tell the difference.

 

Now, lest you all think I’m spending my money foolishly, I must hasten to add that the scotch bottles I am drawing from are wee little miniatures. So my tasting session will ultimately be a very brief one.

 

Dinner was the last bit of cheese from the Mull of Kintyre. I managed to get a good five days out of it. I also had a slice of Scottish pressed game terrine. It looked rather tasty in the shop, but when I brought it home only then did I realize quite what it was I’d bought. It is 33% wild deer, poor things, and 33% UK pheasant. It really must have been wild, because next to the bar code is the warning “May contain lead shot”.

 

Anyway, this marks the end of my first week in the tiling course. So far it has been very instructive and surprisingly enjoyable. Before you know it, under Stuart’s expert guidance, I’ll be able to retile all the loos in Holyrood Palace.

 

Today was my day off, so I thought I’d take care of business and send off my things to the laundry. That done, I sauntered farther north on Clerk Street and took a look at all the splendid architecture in Edinburgh’s old town. Judging from the number of tourists milling about in the dead of winter, I imagine the city in the summer must be standing room only. 

 

At this point I’d like to describe at length a part of the city that is very strange. It is called Mary King’s Close. A Close, as far as I can tell, is a narrow alley. The city once had many of such alleys, which sloped down from the high point of land around Edinburgh Castle, and ended up at the royal moat. Bordered by up to ten storeys of stone tenements, they were almost continually in the shade. At one point in the 18th century, the city built over top of some of the alleys to make way for some municipal buildings. So what little light there was disappeared and the inhabitants were left in complete darkness underground. Mary King’s Close was one such alley and today you can only see its remnants if you plop down 11 pounds and join a private tour. In the summer this sight is so popular you have to book way in advance, so out of curiosity I put down my money and bought a ticket.

 

A very overweight, sneezing, coughing tour guide in a period costume, who I think should not have reported to work that day, started off by asking if anyone was claustrophobic. He then led us down several flights of stone steps, into an empty chamber. The room dated back to about 1620. At 12 ft by 18 ft, its original roof was only 6ft high. Called a “low house”, this was where Edinburgh’s poorest once lived, at the ground level of the alley.  Here they slept, 12 to a room, with no windows, running water or ventilation, with only the cheapest of fish oil to illuminate the room.

 

At 15 pound per year, the rent was cheap. Having no windows was particularly economical in those days, because daylight was taxed. The more and the larger windows you had, the more tax you paid.

 

There was a bucket in the corner of that sad little room for a toilet, and by city law, you could empty that bucket only two times a day. One can only imagine the stench. By tradition, the youngest in the room, usually toddlers, had the job to empty the bucket. They’d cart it off to the door and throw the contents onto the alley. All the upper floor neighbors emptied their buckets at the same at time, making the alley a place best to avoid when the church bells at St. Giles church rang at 7am and 10pm.

 

The effluent would flow down the alley and end up in the royal moat. Since the alley had no hand railings or steps, it remained a slick, very treacherous surface to navigate in the best of times.

 

The richest man in the tenements, our guide informed us between snufflings, was the medical doctor. In the 1600s the best way for the doctor to treat disease was to obtain a bottle of the patient’s urine and examine it through the glass. If this did not reveal the cause of the complaint, he would open the bottle and take a good sniff. If even this did not clear up the mystery, he would drink the urine until he felt able to form an opinion. Sometimes he would need two bottles of urine to get to the bottom of it.

Doctors, needless to say, did not live very long in the 1600s.

 

The last man to live in Mary King’s Close was an elderly fellow who, in 1897, was evicted to make way for yet another of those enormous Victorian public buildings that line the Edinburgh escarpment. After being paid 400 pounds, the old geezer finally agreed to leave his beloved home, which happened to be the only one in the area that actually had a flush toilet. He was so proud of his toilet, which he called his “thunder box”, that he left his door open so that all those in the alley could see it as they passed by. His home still exists, deep under the streets of Edinburgh, buried under the City Chambers building. We saw his thunder box and the Victorian wallpaper that lined his vestibule. Apparently the Victorians mixed arsenic into their wallpaper paste, thinking it would prevent mold from forming. I suppose arsenic only works for so long, because the green, 140-year-old wallpaper had gone completely black.

 

The rest of the day was spent wandering aimlessly around. So that’s about it for my blog today.

 

Tomorrow I will attempt to post this blog at the Twitch internet and gaming emporium. With any luck, I will also finally have some photos for you to see.

 

Next post: sometime around mid-week, unless I have something earth-shaking to report.