a.Edinburgh:visited {
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}I returned to haunt my former haunt in Edinburgh for a couple of days, this time for a web conference.
The conference itself was great. I had the chance to chat with clever people like the ones from Clearleft and Yahoo!, and I really did get a lot from it. Being a new conference, it was all quite small, so there were plenty of opportunities to shoot the breeze. Discussing the idea of Web Principles with people outside the BBC was especially cool, and a useful reality check.
On the other hand, being back in the ‘Burgh was, as ever, a bit odd. It’s good odd, overall, but still bloody odd. My good friend Dr Vines, who left for Canada a couple of years before I moved to London, described his eventual return as being “like coming back to the scene of a crime”, and at the time I couldn’t quite see what he meant. This time I see.
I think Edinburgh has an bizarrely intense personality. Everywhere has a certain something, of course: London, Manchester, Glasgow… all have a distinct feeling about them, and anywhere you spend any significant time is bound to get under your skin somehow. London has obvious massive capitalness, but Edinburgh is so much smaller that it has a kind of condensed capitalness. And maybe the smell of malt and breweries that pervades the place somehow connects directly to some inner emotional-olfactory-psychotic-nostalgic part of the brain…
London has enough pubs and parks and corners-you-never-knew to last you the rest of your life without repeating yourself. Every nook and cranny of Edinburgh seemed exactly as I left it. Just as if I never left.
As for Tim’s crime scene metaphor, I think it’s something to do with the feeling of leaving something unresolved. Just as if you never left. Here’s the thing: if you go away from a place while you’re in a bit of a state for some reason, you’ll rediscover it all when you go back, even if you’ve done a great job of sorting things out in the meantime. Especially if the place in question is small and smells strangely of breweries.