On the trail of Scotland Street

Published on Wednesday 6 August 2008 19:46

HERE'S an unfashionable thought. It comes into the mind of Matthew, one of the characters in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street. "There was nothing wrong in appreciating a bourgeois paradise," he thinks, "when every other sort of paradise on offer had proved to be exactly the opposite of what paradise should be."

He's right, of course. And that corner of Edinburgh in which Matthew lives and works – the New Town – is indeed the just about nearest thing Scotland has to offer to a bourgeois paradise.

Matthew isn't the only one to appreciate this. Throughout Britain, McCall Smith's gentle comedy about New Town life is so popular that the latest book in the series, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, to be officially launched at The Scotsman tonight, is already a bestseller, straight in at No4 in the hardback fiction charts.

The rest of the world is no less appreciative. With foreign editions in 11 countries also doing well, tourists are arriving in Edinburgh with a greater knowledge of its New Town than ever before.

So tomorrow, for readers who want a break from the daily purgatory of hard news, The Scotsman is doing something it has never done before. For the first time in our history we are publishing a brief guide to bourgeois paradise.

Our In the Footsteps of 44 Scotland Street guide, which comes free with tomorrow's paper, zigzags wildly between fact and fiction. As its compiler, Patricia Cleveland-Peck, points out, in Dundas Street alone you can move from Matthew's Something Special Gallery (fictional) to the Scottish Gallery (real), from Big Lou's coffee bar The Morning After (fictional), past the place Bertie (fictional) was rescued by Jack McConnell (real) to Glass & Thompson's caf (real) where Glasgow gangster Lard O'Connor (fictional, and not their usual sort of customer) handed over a picture that would later be verified by James Holloway (real), director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (wonderfully real). From there, it's not too far to go either east, to Valvona & Crolla, purveyors of paradisiacal provisions, or west to Caf St Honor, an occasional scene of temptation if not actual sin. Even further west lies Moray Place.

McCall Smith, one senses, has a slight problem with Moray Place. It is, admittedly, very grand, impressively so. But yet it's here, in its even more discreet gardens at the rear overlooking the Water of Leith, that he sites the (again fictional) meeting of Edinburgh naturalists. Perhaps those high windows conceal other secrets: certainly, Matthew's step-mother Janice, a Moray Place resident, is shown as blatantly lacking in good taste. Anyone who wants to fit state-of-the-art kitchens into fine Georgian buildings, as she does, is obviously just a well-heeled vandal.

So it's not quite perfect, this bourgeois paradise you can now, thanks to Unesco City of Literature and McCall Smith's publishers, explore that much more easily. But it's still a lot more perfect than most other cities could offer up in fiction.

Within a couple of square miles of the New Town's clean-dressed sandstone, you can find most of the requirements for a good life. The Cumberland Arms, where Cyril the dog has his own beer dish; Valvona & Crolla, where Bertie's mother Irene buys him his favourite Panforte di Siena; St Cuthbert's church, where Matthew marries Elspeth at the start of the latest novel in the series – in places like these, on the boundaries of Scotland Street's world, there's plenty to keep body and soul in harmony.

There's a line in The Unbearable Lightness of Scones in which McCall Smith sums up the enduring appeal of Edinburgh, in which he has lived for nearly all his adult life. "Every set of steps, every close, every corner," he writes, "had its memories, spoke with voices of those who had been there a long time ago, but who in a way were still there."

Indeed it does. But when you follow our guide In the Footsteps of 44 Scotland Street, you'll notice that quite a lot of those steps, closes and corners echo with other memories – not to do with history but to do with one man's stories, both witty and wise, which have gone around the world but always come back to circle lovingly, and appreciatively, round this bourgeois paradise.

&#149 The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith, is published by Polygon, priced 14.99.

Get your free Scotland Street map in today's paper

THE National Trust is to use wood pellets to fuel the boilers in the 17th-century stately home where the BBC's Pride and Prejudice was filmed. The new boilers will release less carbon dioxide than the oil-fired system currently used at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire. It's part of the Trust's eco-drive, which also sees solar panels fitted on some buildings.