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This week, I'm running away from Edinburgh -- to Berlin.
Edinburgh (where I live) is a very odd city. Like Rome, it's built on seven hills; the basalt remains of an extinct volcano, and one that was scoured by an ice sheet just 12,000 years ago, so that the city is dominated by a collection of crags and cliffs. It's been inhabited since the early iron age, but the modern city dates to the middle ages, and has been shaped by war and geography. You can find the first ten and twelve story high apartment blocks in the world here, built in the middle ages to cram bodies inside the city walls. (Imagine living in a tenth story apartment with no elevators and no plumbing or water supplies!) There are roads that pass over and under each other, streets on bridges with buildings to either side, streets in tunnels, secret histories and royal societies. There's nothing quite like Edinburgh, and it's a wonderful place to live and write ... until the summer, when the Mimes arrive.
The Mimes -- in white-face, pretending to be statues, or delivering very dodgy weather forecasts via sign language -- are one of the first harbingers of the Festival. During the Edinburgh International Festival (one of the largest performing arts binges in the world) the entire city goes a little bit mad. Everywhere stays open a couple of hours longer, and the pubs and clubs (which normally open until after midnight) frequently fail to eject their clientelle until dawn. There's a performance in every basement, stand up comedy on every street corner, the population triples, and you can't go out of your front door to buy a newspaper without tripping over a street theatre troupe from Prague or a gaggle of lost tourists from New York.
Nancy Ellwood, Editor 
