To the outside world, it’s a festival, a castle, a university, a tin of shortbread and a drone of bagpipes. To Jackie Hunter, it’s home, and it’s more about coping with the weather ...
On the short, steeply curving street where I live, the neighbourhood shops offer an unexpectedly refined display of goods: between my front door and the pub on the corner it’s possible to buy Yohji Yamamoto’s artfully cut menswear, cherry-red rubber shoes by Vivienne Westwood, Tom Dixon armchairs and Ingo Maurer lights, Gothic tattoos, a pierced nipple (or two), quirky Scandinavian kitchenware and even a tubby-bellied woodburning stove, one of which would nicely warm my crow’s-nest flat, where on windy nights the sash windows rattle like a box of cutlery as easterly gales blast in off the North Sea.
It is certainly not the clichéd image of an Edinburgh thoroughfare—Robert Burns’s portrait on a shortbread tin, buskers and their deathless droning bagpipes, tiny shops peddling kilts, haggis, souvenir fudge, saltire fridge magnets, ceramic Scottie dogs, tartan scarves woven in China and lifeless prints of vast Highland glens. No—to find all that, I must walk past the pub and round the corner on to the Royal Mile. This is a city where the twee meets the rugged, where ancient sits benignly next to modern, and where Georgian elegance grandly rises above the lingering miasma of medieval squalor.
Adapting your personal sense of style to Edinburgh’s many idiosyncrasies and paradoxes is no easy task. Once, in the early days, I complained to a colleague about the difficulty of dressing appropriately for the Edinburgh weather. She said nothing, but pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside was stashed a telescopic umbrella, tights of varying thickness, a shawl, walking shoes, a white T-shirt, sunglasses, hiking socks, a cagoule, a hat and a hairdryer. These days, my own desk is similarly stocked and as meticulously audited as a hotel-room minibar....
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