3 September 2025, Edinburgh, Scotland.
“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” — Thomas Aquinas
On Wednesday, from Glasgow through to Edinburgh to catch up with some old friends.
It’s only forty five minutes from Glasgow Queen Street to Edinburgh Waverley, and though the stations themselves in each city are – to the untrained eye at least – similarly utilitarian and unremarkable, on emerging in Scotland’s Capital, the visitor is struck by the marked difference between the two cities. Glasgow, its skyline already dominated by the Glasgow Tower, at 127 metres the tallest structure in Scotland, is said to be on the verge of a skyscraper boom. Technically, of course, a skyscraper has to be over 150 metres tall, and the Glasgow Tower falls short of this. So will Portcullis House in Charing Cross and The Ard near Blytheswood Hill, being built to house students in 36-storey buildings, falling just short of the required skyscraper height when they’re finished in 2028. But in June of this year, Glasgow City Council adopted its new Tall Buildings Policy, and the skyline is set to change. Perhaps not immediately a new Hong Kong or New York, but a step in their direction, and clustered skyscrapers seem to be the future.
By contrast, Edinburgh has set its face firmly against anything high-rise. The City fathers have always legislated to avoid anything that disrupts the historic skyline of a city that, though mostly Georgian, has a profoundly mediaeval feel to it, especially in the so-called Old Town. The area behind Waverley Station, with its narrow wynds and steep closes and streets running up to the Royal Mile feel like they haven’t changed in centuries and create a vivid sense of times past. You feel like at any moment you could encounter a Victorian urchin or a mediaeval drover, and exchange a glance and a word. Outside the Station, the drained Nor’ Loch is now Princess Street Gardens, set above which the sandstone elegance of the Assembly Buildings, the classical poise of the Galleries on the Mound, and higher still the red ashlar and white-harled walls of Ramsay Garden luxuriate beneath the Castle Esplanade, the whole vista surely one of the finest cityscapes in the whole world. Towering, indeed majestic, and yet low-rise!
Abandoning the centre for the coast, I was bound for ‘Porty’, Portobello, a seaside suburb of Edinburgh some three miles to the East, whisked there in her car by the wonderful Kitty Muirden. There we joined Werner, her husband, and Shona Bell, for a leisurely lunch and later for a walk through the streets of Porty with its eclectic mixture of Georgian and Victorian villas and cottages, and along the two-mile-long promenade with its award-winning beach. “It’s terribly gentrified these days,” Kitty told me as we passed through the streets, “we even have a shop that sells handmade fresh pasta!” No pasta for lunch, though, but instead a delicious spread home-cooked and home-grown by Werner. In what promises to be a sabbatical of newness, airline meals and relative solitude, time spent with old friends around the kitchen table, chatting, ruminating and laughing feels very spoiling.
Later, from the coast back through the centre of the city and up to Morningside for dinner – also home-cooked and with home-grown apples – with the Minister of Morningside in his elegant, indeed palatial Manse. “We’ll leave the blinds up,” Derek said, “because it delights the old lady opposite to see a dining room being used for its correct purpose.” And there, amidst candlelight, we gossiped and joked and drank until, Cinderella-like, I fled for the train back to Glasgow and arrived home just before midnight struck.
In the midst of what often feels like a low-rise existence, one experience towers above all others: time spent at table with old friends. It is one of the glories of life, and a blessing. And I am richly blessed. Not for naught did the ‘angelic doctor,’ Thomas Aquinas, say, “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.”