As previouly noted, Edinburgh has a castle and a lot of old stuff: most of the city proper was built in a few quick waves of building, and the urban fabric drops off quite quickly—there is little sprawl—at least on the inland sides. Nearly anywhere in town, the same stone walls stretch from street to street, walls of gray granite (though my three-year eye has become tuned to the varied hues, the pinks and reds and blacker grays, that one can see across town).

This oldness pleases me: these edifices represent the solid, tolerable, and sometimes contented lives of the workers and bourgeoisie of another century, at a time when urban life and culture, the capitalist system, and the information economy, were all just being worked out—not to mention the modern tension between productivity and play. Scattered around its monolithic, zero-green tenement blocks, Edinburgh generously sets out public space for pure fun. The Edinburgh Meadows, a "town green" of sorts, is a trivially simple and yet utterly beautiful and useful lens of green stretching across the center of town; it is triangulated by tree-lined paths which make distinct perceptual spaces. Citizens of the city, high and low, have used it for centuries for their ball games (hurling, footer, and golf) and picnics and languid strolls in tolerable weather. The public golf course at one edge speaks a lost vision of the game: not the secluded country clubs and backroom deals of racially-exclusive businessmen but rather hordes of drunks smashing a wee ball with sticks (like spitting cherry-pits into the trash can: an unexclusive sport).

People are tempered. Longcoats and woolly jumpers prevail—not gear to be causing trouble in. Tracksuited lads might "chib" a passerby sometimes, but by and large the peace is kept. I feel calm, watching students, academics, young bankers and coders walk to work in such decent attire, such conventional textiles, no Triple F.A.T. Goose to be found. And still the people love their rock and their roll, their oonts-oonts dance tracks, and their reggae too. The Jazz Bar on Chambers Street has a good act or more almost every night of the week.