Down the road, turn right, past the dive shop and across the wee canal with swans. Into the roundabout hurly-burly with buses bustling past and cars and no one stopping. Out of there, down the long row of B & Bs and past the old sign welded on saying "Burghmuirhead" because of the swamp it once headed. Then you just ford easily through a back street and you're on the Meadows.

Glorious Meadows, Hope Meadows. I take the North Meadow Walk today and thread in through the back way up to Buccleuch Place, cobblestone street of Extreme Parking. The flat blocks alongside it are little departments now, academics with signs like "Department for the Study of Disappearing Language," and yet on top floors you see clotheslines hanging inside the rooms. Someone lives in this bundle of visual noise.

At 2 BP I hop the tall steps and throw open the old-knobbed door. The stairs inside are marbled to hide what looks like little cuke slices thrown from untidy salads. Inside on the fourth floor you can see all the way to the Royal Observatory, its sharp outline one of the gray cards stacked in the diorama-distance. The land here is wrinkled, as layers of bed clothes sharply pressed. Nearer, straight down, some club for Bowls cuts its wet green figure at a rakish angle against the line of the street. But it's perfectly square, that Bowls court, utterly square and manicured and never used.

Exiting all that, its cross the street and down the way, past the Human Be-in and all its merry coed pre-meds, down further to the edge of West Nicolson Street where Susie's Wholefood Diner has fresh tomatoes, falafel, spruced broccoli, and stir-fried vegetable—Southerly foods, all. I eat well here for £5.50 every time I'm near. They have a texture of DIFFERENT CHAIRS and SMALL PANES that make large-than-life soft light inside. Here the touchy-feely, big-thinking coeds congregate, my kind.

From there it's off again, heading home, to work well in the privacy of a place my own, as it were. For fun I head round the top of Teviot, that citadel—only student union in the world built like a cathedral—and down that way and into the Middle Meadow Walk ("NO BARBECUES"), into that wide, lavish promenade, Hope Meadows, nothing but trees, nothing but air and grass and distance. I've got things to do but hang it all, I'll sit for a minute; the distant shush of cars on the Southern bow of the Meadows lulls me; calls from footballers amuse me (are these Czech?); and walkers too, in longcoats, grand, black and shock-red, they people my view, they stick to paths but break out, too, crossing and crissing the crisp swathes of the near space or the far, all the vaulted cells framed by these stately rows of trees, this sweet honeycomb.

Work calls. Up from the bench, I leave my footballers back, catch the eye of curious strollers up on the North Meadow Walk (my new shoes are very yellow) and tuck myself down into the wedges between there and Home Street, where City is full-on and the shop-awnings are starting to come down on their long polls. The B & Bs in their long procession are tawdry and vacant by turns; the occassional babyware shop or the Oddball Mall (so-called, a tiny vintage joint) pop out like strawberries in a dust bed. When I come into the tight contention of that old familiar roundabout I've dropped almost all the way home (what's the street called? who can say? who can know the arcane streetmap mind?). From there it's just across the slight canal, edging the dive shop, and the easy slide of my own home street, past the overgrown lot and up to the door, key in the lock, and have at water.