DUCKS, MORNINGSIDE by Tim Cresswell

The fact that I moved to Morningside in Edinburgh about a year ago and now, if things were normal, I would walk down Morningside Park to Morningside Lane and then turn left on Morningside Road to get to work and I like the fact that it is just the right distance to walk to work and back – on the edge of the center but not really on the edge literally or figuratively and I met Jo in Blackwell’s for a book launch and Jo asked me where I was living and I said Morningside and she smiled and said “of course you do” not because 10,000 protestants lined up in Morningside in 1935 to throw insults at Catholics but more because there are at least eight artisan coffee shops between home and work so I am not counting the Nero, the Costa or the Starbucks not that it matters as I can’t do that walk anymore unlike the deer that became a social media star by galloping past Caffé Nero along Morningside Road so we could have our very own return-of-nature story and about half of the time since I moved I’ve been reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann every night thinking about all those cakes and pies she’s making and how it is different from Karl Ove Knausgård as I started the last of his My Struggle books and had to give up when he started analyzing Mien Kampf paragraph by paragraph and all that smoking made me want to smoke and, anyway, I was listening to the backlash against guys doing their meta everyday life thing where not much happens but lots of thinking and "look-at-me" cleverness and I had sworn not to read the new Ben Lerner novel for broadly feminist kinds of reasons but the reviews of the new one are so positive and Ali Smith (or was it Zadie?) really liked Knausgård and I remembered how the scene where Lerner's alter-ego is jacking off to donate sperm was so well done so what is there to lose but I will finish Ellman first even if I don't get the bits with the mountain lions yet but perhaps I could write something kind of meta that includes the fact that “Morningside speed” means cocaine and that a “Morningside accent” is someone who is Scottish trying to sound English but also that this all used to be a forest beyond the city wall called Burgh Muir and this is where they quarantined people afflicted with the plague – the real one –  who definitely had to socially distance and have all their clothes boiled in huge vats and they probably didn’t have Morningside accents and Dylan just came out with this 17 minute song that's not really a song but kind of spoken word with music that varies by two or three notes and the last bit with all those lines that begin with "play" is genius even if I don't want to listen to it much unlike Blood on the Tracks and Maddy had me watch the Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix and I didn't know any of the songs but did feel sort of sorry for her after what Kanye did and liked some of the songs at least I listened to them all the way through unlike the judges who were supposed to have read Ducks but gave up at the 250th "the fact that" which I do have some questions about as it is not clear why she needs to start every thought that way unlike Dylan's song where the use of "play" repeatedly is totally as it should be but it’s a great book for a lockdown, Ducks, not Dylan I mean, as the thoughts have that scattered random distracted quality of lockdown thoughts in the early toilet roll panic phase and there was a man hoovering the bedroom across the road and the seagulls that nest on his roof are back so soon there will be the cries of the chicks to wake us up before the quiet streets and the odd people looking like bandits with scarves around their mouths walking down the middle of the road from the old station clock that used to mark the presence of an actual station before the Beechings cuts in the 1960s that made way for the Bank of Scotland in the old station and the Waiting Room restaurant close to the now invisible Jordan Burn that is channeled under Pizza Express which was converted from a church past the boarded up windows of The Merlin where Alice and I watched England lose to the USA in the women's world cup across from Boots where I walk to pick up Carol's blood pressure drugs that makes her moderately high risk and she should probably stay in a separate room for twelve weeks while the ten days I stayed indoors after a mild cough changed Morningside with the shops all shut and the bandana bandits and I did almost cry the first time standing outside Marks and Spencer two meters from anyone and I wonder what has happened to the two homeless guys who hang out on our street with their cans of Tennents and bits of cardboard outside the house of the woman I now know is called Joy after we stood and clapped the key workers as some guy played bagpipes and then introduced ourselves agreeing that it was ok to clap and to believe people should support the NHS the rest of the time with more than applause and I went back up to our flat grateful I don't have to walk 250km in India thanks to a sudden lockdown as 250km is not the kind of distance you can walk with no food and a child in your arms but when did the word "meta" become a word that can be dropped into everyday conversation I mean what is the time lag between a critical theory seminar on metafiction and school kids saying “that’s really meta” and didn’t Ben Lerner also write that poems are always records of failure or something like that and there is some kind of gap between the ideal poems we have in our heads and the real ones that are produced kind of like Taylor Swift and her songs and I did notice that Taylor Swift referred to one of her own lines as "doing a Dylan thing" and Maddy looked at me out of the corner of her eye and grinned just at the moment I looked at her out of the corner of mine, also grinning, so five and half volumes of My Struggle is an awful lot to read but not finish so maybe I will get to the end and then there’s the question of whether or not Roy Fisher was a psychogeographer when he wrote "the street, the chemist's shop, the lamp: / a stain in the plaster that so /resembles - and the body of air / caught between the ceiling / and the cupboard-top, that's like / nothing that every was" and whether psychogeography is really psychogeography anymore but oh oh I have missed walking - not 250km just 3 miles or so a day down Morningside Road and across the Links and the Meadows to Drummond Street passed the Mexican restaurant someone said was good and where we can go after all this if it survives and I wonder if Ellman's narrator will survive being stuck in her car in the snow and to be honest I don't quite know how she got there as I thought she was in her kitchen glazing cinnamon rolls or flipping tarte-tatins which I would like to make sometime they seem so Morningside like the fact that crème brulee is labelled as an essential by Waitrose or that the ice cream van plays Rachmaninov which I am not sure is true but there’s also the regular homeless people sitting on cardboard on the floor outside Sainsbury’s Local, then Waitrose, then near Montpelier’s where the accountants hang out for post-work beers and chicken wings, then the other Sainsbury’s Local in Bruntsfield before you get to the Links but I was happy when Bross Bagels arrived as they make Montreal style bagels that are better than New York ones according to some geographers I met in a bar in Boston after a long day of conferencing where I knocked over a plastic cup of Jim Beam and someone told me there are mass graves from bubonic plague, the real plague, the black death, under the hummocks of the pitching and putting course at the Links and years later I walked a long way to Fairmount Bagels in Montreal to have them with that smoked meat they like so much there but Bross make theirs with maple syrup just so you know its Canadian but back to the tart tatins I think they would probably fall apart or get stuck and not come out of the pan properly to be honest I never really figured out where Morningside ends as pretty soon you’re in Bruntsfield which is really where the bagels are and the police box where the guy sells the coffee and the homemade biscuits and I don’t think I’ve seen police boxes anywhere else except on Doctor Who and I wonder if there is a system for the homeless that allocates their spaces as they seemed to be the same people outside each shop or bar and I guess Morningside ends at Holy Cross where all the churches are or rather were because now they’re community centers and coffee shops and some people call it caffeine corner where, it you turn right as you’re heading in to town you might find a little space with a gravestone on Chamberlain Road with an actual skull and cross bones set into a wall surrounded by fugitive buddleia and lilacs accompanied by a sign that tells you that this is John Livingstone’s tomb and that John Livingstone was an apothecary – a key worker of sorts -  who died of the real plague in 1645 and if you get to page 307 of Ducks, Newburyport you find the sentence “the fact that Ben now tells me bird flu only has to mutate a few more time to cause a global pandemic like Spanish flu and that, if that happens, civilization will grind to a halt within a year.”