A visit to Morningside

On the wet weekend I headed off to the library in Morningside.  My usual library is Fountainbridge, grim and dirty on the outside, and dull inside with a small collection.  Morningside is a handsome part of Edinburgh and its library has a fine big interior with a dome and marble pillars, also with a great many books that I want to read.  I handed some of them over to the librarian to be stamped.

"You were watching Newsnight Review last night," he said.

"Yes, how do you know?"

"A book by De Lillo and one by Germaine Greer." 

And indeed I had picked up the De Lillo as his latest book had been discussed on the programme and everyone seemed to reckon that he was a great writer, so I thought I would try him. Germaine Greer had been a reviewer and I had seen her book The Boy on the shelves.  She is a writer I fell in love with many years ago and however much she betrays me with her wrong-headed and perverse judgements I always come back to her and her forceful prose. 

The charity shops in Morningside are grander than the ones down my way.  The assistant was bustling about putting clothes back on hangers.  "Can I try that skirt on in the window?" I said.  "Well yes, but everyone would look at you."  The other shoppers laughed and I couldn't think of any riposte except a sarcastic, "Very witty."

On the way to visit a friend, I passed the corner where there used to be a small garden centre, and you were served by a man as old as time and eternity who gave you advice.  Now of course it has been replaced by a Starbucks and a Tesco Metro, which seems to be a grossly obvious satire.

My friend and I scoffed food from the very good deli and complained how the country is going to the dogs.  His particular canine destination was a Horizon programme about a particle accelerator in Switzerland that is to replicate the Big Bang - exciting enough in itself - but they had to whizz it up with jump cuts and that annoying way they flash from talking head to talking head while they speak so it takes three heads to finish one sentence.  The fault lies in the fact that these programmes aren't made by scientists but humanities graduates.  I protested, as I am a humanities graduate and we agreed that the screenwriters must have degrees in media studies and the directors have only ever made pop videos. 

"Not how it used to be," I said.  "Remember that programme Life on Earth with Joseph Brodksy?"

"What, who?"

"You know, that programme."

We worked out that I meant The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski, not a Russian poet fronting  a programme made by David Attenborough.

"This is a conversation in an old people's home," he said.