Our Room

Tuesday 19th February, 2008

My Aunty's favourite city is, and always has been, Edinburgh. She travelled there in 1976, two years before I was born, and I have been raised with this constant understanding that of all the places she went, it was this city that most stole her heart.

And a little piece of family love, and feeling close to someone like my Aunty Libby, was exactly what I needed when I arrived in Edinburgh. And in a crazy frantic way, exactly what I found.

I left Manchester for Edinburgh on this day, and it was not an easy day. Oddly I think my (hideously severe) hangover helped... (I woke up with my shoes still laced up, if that gives you some idea!). But some days being a lil numbed down to a level where simple tasks take your full attention can help. Some days there is no room for thought or reflection. Some days you've just got to get up, breathe, and put one foot in front of the other until the sun sets.

I was moving to Edinburgh very spontaneously, after my living situation in Manchester capitulated somewhat. In fact, I nearly went Home home, but I just kinda couldn't do it - not without my summer of music festivals, and not without seeing Edinburgh. No, more than that. Not without knowing Edinburgh.

Through my wonderful 'dam family I came to meet a beautiful young sloe-eyed girl named Storm, and her student dorm room was to be my soft place to land. Storm is possibly the only person I have ever met who talks more than me, so us living together in a dorm about the size of a broom cupboard could easily have spelled disaster...

Well, it didn't. From the moment I got there, this beautiful and incredibly generous soul just kept repeating to me - "we just fit". And fit we did, in the tinest of dormrooms, in the most unlikely of situations, for the most perfect time.

This particular Tuesday, I bid a crisp, sunny Manchester a teary goodbye on the station platform at Piccadilly Station... I heaved my hangover and my endless kilos of crap North, through breathtaking rolling hills... and I found just enough space, and so much love, in a tiny dormroom in Warrender Park Road.