Londoners come for weekends or on business. Well-behaved hordes of Welshmen come for international rugby matches, and equally well-behaved, if somewhat tweedier, groups of English rugby enthusiasts make regular visits to witness the humiliation of Scotland's rugby team at Murrayfield — a meeting with an ancient historical agenda that stretches back to Bannockburn, Culloden and other landmarks.
Why do so many people come to Edinburgh? Physical beauty has something to do with it. English cities and towns can be heart-stoppingly beautiful, when viewed from a favourable angle — Cambridge springs to mind — but there are very few of them that can rival the splendour of Edinburgh. This is a city that sits in the same company as Venice, Florence or Paris.
There is a grandeur here that one simply does not see very much in the British Isles. Edinburgh has made its architectural mistakes, of course, but the fierce and marvellous Cockburn Association, which guards the civic inheritance, has done a great deal to prevent the worst excesses of 20th-century brutalism from wreaking too much damage. Alas for Glasgow, a pretty city that had a motorway driven through its heart and saw its beauty bleed from the wound.
But being attractive, as we all know, is not enough to make you interesting. There are plenty of good-looking towns where nothing happens. And one of the reasons why nothing happens there is because nothing has ever happened there. The fact that a town is a capital — that it has had some history — means that the present is made more vital. An exciting past makes for an exciting present.
As Evelyn Waugh observed in his wartime trilogy, in an extremely funny dinner-party scene, Edinburgh vibrates. And, of course, Jean Brodie, the heroine of Muriel Spark's incomparable novel, passes the same message on to the girls who come under her dubious spell. You are not provincials, she reminds them, you are citizens of a broader Europe. She also famously tells them that they are the créme de la créme, and that absurdly delicious phrase gets very close to the heart of a traditional Edinburgh problem — smugness.
Muriel Spark painted the definitive picture of bourgeois Edinburgh of the 1930s; the modern city awaits similar magisterial treatment. There have been other literary portraits, though, such as those provided by Ian Rankin, one of the world's leading crime writers. Rankin comes from Fife and looks at the town with what was originally an outsider's eye. His Inspector Rebus likes a drink (social realism) and inhabits a succession of bars while wrestling with the numerous murders that seem to crop up in this actually relatively murder-free city (here the social realism wears a bit thin).
Rebus is beautifully conceived, and his like can be spotted quite easily in the selfsame bars — the Oxford Bar is his actual howff (a useful Scottish name for a bar) — as can Rankin himself, from time to time. Rankin is an engaging man, perpetually dressed in a black T-shirt — or perhaps one might say a noir T-shirt. His quite brilliant and frequently lyrical account of the city transcends the bounds of genre and provides a vivid picture of parts of the town that visitors can easily identify and savour, whether or not they choose to take the official Rebus tour that is on offer.
Crime and social pathology seem to have been favourite topics of late-20th-century Scottish writers. This is understandable perhaps, because there has been so much suffering and stark social pathology in Scotland. Poverty and deprivation have made a large mark on the Scottish soul, as did a stern Calvinism, and this misery obviously had to surface in Scottish literature. But that is not the only picture. Although there is a measure of darkness to be encountered in Edinburgh if one looks for it — the High Street and the Old Town, with their warrens of closes, are fertile territory for such matters — darkness is not the only tone on offer.
There is a case, perhaps, for looking up as well as down. And if one looks up in Edinburgh, one realises that this is not just the city of Burke and Hare and their medical- research programme, it is also the city of the Enlightenment. It is the city of the philosopher David Hume, whose seated statue can be seen outside the old Sheriff Court on the High Street. It is the city of Walter Scott and Stevenson — whose works are celebrated in the intriguing Writers' Museum in Lady Stair's Close. It is the city of the poets Ruthven Todd, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Norman MacCaig, and of the novelist Compton Mackenzie. It is a city of light and intellect, the home of universities and learned societies, of a whole separate legal system, and of a national church.
So although gritty film and fiction may have accurately portrayed one side of Edinburgh's existence — and in so doing may have corrected a rather twee, shortbread-tin picture of the city — the dark side of the town is only a small part of the overall picture. In many respects, the Edinburgh of Jean Brodie is still very much in business. That Edinburgh may coexist with a whole range of alternative Edinburghs, but it is one that many people may actually be quite interested in seeing.
And yet it is not easy for the visitor to a city to taste the flavour of the real life of the place. One of the drawbacks of modern tourism is that it is often so crass. Not only does it degrade the milieu it sets out to reveal — with all the commercial vulgarity it brings with it — but it is often inept in illuminating the real life that takes place in the background. The art cities of Italy provide an example of this. Florence and Venice have become theme parks, and it is increasingly difficult to get more than a glimpse of the real life of the citizens of these two great cities.
I remember spending several months studying in Siena about 30 years ago and being intrigued by the ordinary sights of daily life that one could witness at every turn. Very close to the house in which I was staying was a working-men's cafe in which builders and other tradesmen took their breakfast. The pieces of pizza were cut with garden shears, and men knocked back a large glass of raw red wine with their breakfast. One of the regulars was the man who walked around the town pasting large posters on the walls, usually obituary notices. He had a cap and uniform jacket, as just about every minor functionary had.
