At the start of this month, we took a four night family holiday to Edinburgh. I'm no royalist but I found myself quite gripped by much of the television coverage of Queen Elizabeth's death in September. These events made me think about succession, symbolism and the Scottish crown just as much as teaching 'Macbeth' always does. As the late queen's coffin processed down the Royal Mile, I found myself thinking that it was too long since I had last visited Edinburgh and that viewings of the Scottish crown jewels and the Palace of Holyrood needed to be on the itinerary. So that's exactly what we did and neither of these visits disappointed. I'm left with renewed interest in another queen - Mary, Queen of Scots - and would be interested to see Schiller's 'Mary Stuart' whenever it is next staged.
We were very active over our week in Edinburgh and packed in plenty of museums, walks and meals as well catching up with friends. Left to my own devices in Edinburgh, I would have happily followed up even more literary leads; my sons tolerated a couple of short excursions - to Canongate Kirk, and to the Scottish Writers' Museum. At the former, we found the graves of Adam Smith and of Agnes McLehose (better known as Burn's muse 'Clarinda'):
But to see her was to love her; Love but her, and love for ever. Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met-or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
What first caught my eye outside the church was this statue of Robert Fergusson which in turn led us to Fergusson's grave and then on to Smith's and McLehose's. I was incredibly moved by poor Robert Fergusson's story - a talented poet who was afflicted by depression, and then by a brain injury resulting from a fall, which soon led to incarceration, and to his tragically early death at the age of twenty-four. Burns designed and paid for his grave, and also wrote an epitaph for his friend.
During what was quite a rare rainy interlude, we visited the Scottish Writers' Museum, and learned about that particularly celebrated triumvirate of Scottish writers: Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Since my fourteen year old son is studying 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' for GCSE, we devoted most of our time to photographs of and artefacts belonging to Stevenson. I marvelled at the extraordinarily diverse talents of a man who could publish 'A Child's Garden of Verse' in 1885 followed by 'Jekyll and Hyde' in 1886, a book which according to the museum's information board, took him only a week to write. While as a family we spent many enjoyable hours in Edinburgh's most cutting-edge and interactive museums - of which the city boasts several - this small and rather quaint museum was a treat of a different kind, a perfect place to come face to face with these national treasures and literary superstars.
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