You can listen to my weekly music show, The Pollokshaws Cadillac (volume three) on Mixcloud here. Full playlist at the end of this essay.

I used to come to Edinburgh to sell stories. Now I’m here to sell books.

Retailing rare books is (one of) my part-time occupation(s), or call it a spare-time hobby if you like. It began by accident. I’ve always been an obsessive reader, particularly of thrillers, and when Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published in English in 2008, I read the Guardian preview and ordered it in hardback. By accident, two copies arrived so I read one and put the other away, where it lay until the David Fincher movie came out in 2011. Discovering that that first English hardback printing had been abnormally small, I put the books up for auction on eBay. The unread one sold (to the USA) for, I think, £600. The other for nearly £400.

Since then, I’ve occasionally opened Scotland’s northernmost bookshop and sold a few bits and pieces here and there, mostly on commission for other folk. There have been disastrous misvaluations (don’t speak about the Old Man And the Sea first UK edition or that signed Alistair Gray monograph) and conundrums (conundra?) to overcome: How to ship three 18th-century volumes of courtesan-poet-feminist Mrs Robinson’s memoirs to the USA in the face of the crazed Trump tariffs and an understandable desire by the prospective buyer to ensure the books were intact and genuine? Answer: Find someone to actually go to America with them as hand luggage, and conduct a secretive cash deal in a Massachusetts Starbucks.

This bit of Edinburgh business has been conducted remotely by WhatsApp and email, using extensive photographs of the books concerned. There is agreement to buy one volume, with interest in examining three others (I won’t mention the titles or the identity of the buyer). These items are so valuable that I’m reluctant to post them. And so I entrain from Queen Street in Glasgow heading for Waverley, and my past in words.

The Market Street exit from Waverley. The Scotsman Steps. Fleshmarket Close. Once I could bound sweatily up them to the anonymous staff entrance to The Scotsman and Evening News. This North Bridge-facing Gormenghast of innumerable storeys and stories wasn’t just, when I first encountered it, an editorial office. Down in the Market Street bowels were the giant presses. The stink of ink, the unsteady shoogle of epic machinery permeated everything. Fleets of vans would flock there day and night to collect bales of print for distribution. Further up there were abandoned spaces, rooms nobody went to. Features Editor Bob Campbell once showed me a typewriter graveyard, a mountain of trashed Underwoods and Remingtons. Then there were the cramped editorial floors, features, news, the ornate lair of the editor, where I was interviewed by a cigar-smoking Magnus Linklater for a staff job as Highland Reporter. A post that nowadays, like the other regional roles in Aberdeen and the Borders, is economically unthinkable. There was a canteen, a medical surgery, and who knows what else.

The Fleshmarket Close pubs, the Jinglin’ Geordie and the Halfway House, are still there, still open. But no longer strictly segregated between Evening News and Scotsman reporters. There are no reporters here anymore (not that screenslave hacks drink or even go out much today) and no newspapers. The Scotsman building is now mainly a hotel, but that warren of rooms has been pressed into other uses, too. A cinema? Really? What kind of ‘cinema’, exactly? This slew of piss-reeking steps and lanes used to have a function, an industry, but now it feels rotten with indulgence and a glaring search for mere entertainment.

But not as much as the Royal Mile. Staggering up Cockburn Street to the High Street and turning right towards my place of assignation, it’s like stepping, this summer Saturday, into a rubbish Disneyland-via-Mad Max or Neuromancer, one throbbing with badly amplified buskers, horrifying Braveheart impersonators, bagpipers, shouters, jugglers and tourists in their tens of thousands. At first sight, looking castlewards, I doubt if I’ll actually get through the throng. Vape and souvenir shops abound. There is a smell of bad burgers, sweat, suntan lotion and overheating iPhones. John Knox wouldn’t be spinning in his grave. He’d assume Armageddon had come and gone. And it’s not even the festival yet.

Where are they, the Edinburghers of my youth? The erudite bohemians and lofty lawyers, the lurching boulevardiers and commentators, the scruffy columnists who could make a country quake? The effortlessly posh and the aspirational mobility? Where can I find peace, quiet, coolness, escape from this monstrous screen-hunched mass?

Well, fortunately my prospective purchaser has suggested meeting in the National Library of Scotland cafeteria, and there, a few steps from the George IV Bridge, there is an inhalation of the Edinburgh I remember. Among the books. Among the stories.

I treasure my four years on The Scotsman staff, and the following decade-plus as a frequent, sometimes daily contributor and columnist. It led to books, courtesy of Edinburgh’s deceased Mainstream Publishing. And was bartered into a broadcasting career. When you got paid for having stories and knowing how to tell them.

Now I have books in my bag and after a short kerfuffle over identification (“I’m the old geezer in a Slazenger baseball hat”… “I’m next to the TV”) a quick and easy deal is done, preceded by the crucial question I have to pose: are you a dealer or a collector? The latter, fortunately. Everything is sold, money is transferred and checked, and we go our separate ways.

Should I spend the rest of this Saturday doing what I used to do on past empty Edinburgh days? Drinking Deuchar’s IPA in the Guildford Arms or the Café Royal, gazing at Rembrandt’s Sid James selfie in the National Gallery, looking up the old pals who still lurk in this tarnished tourist town, this Mos Eisley of the Scotoverse?

No. Cathcart is calling. But that’s another story.

These Are Not the Drugs (You Are Looking For) — Colonel Mustard & The Dijon Five

Isn’t This World Enough?? — Admiral Fallow

Higher Love. — Prides

Coorie Doon — Matt McGinn

Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice(feat. Watt Nicoll) — Hamish Imlach

I Guess I’m Just a Little Too Sensitive. — Orange Juice

We Could Send Letters. — Aztec Camera

See Those Eyes — Altered Images

Stop the Rain. — Suede Crocodiles

Some Indulgence — The High Bees

Just Like Honey — The Jesus and Mary Chain

Look What Happened Tomorrow. — The Almighty

Flying Saucer Attack — The Rezillos

Take a Trip — THE SHAKIN’ PYRAMIDS

Castlereagh. — Josh Macrae

Messing About On The River — Josh Macrae

A Fool in Love — Frankie Miller

Marley Purt Drive — Lulu

Penicillin Blues — Stone the Crows

Little Bit of Sympathy — Robin Trower

Stone’s Throw from Nowhere — Cado Belle