Extra Salt & Sauce

The latest novel from John Irving (The World According to Garp etc.) starts in Leith.

The main character is the son of a tattoo artist who learned her trade a stone's throw from here. Body art, "scratchers" and "ink addicts" feature heavily throughout the book and it reminded me of our Rock 'n' Roll Christmas tattoos from three years ago.

The artwork for these was created at the Boneyard on Constitution Street who clearly enjoyed doing it judging by the letter that they sent to Rufus afterwards.

Here's a short passage from the book.

"Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned - the song he'd first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom's mantra, he'd thought at the time - to never be a whore.

Oh I'll never be a kittie or a cookie or a tail.
The one place worse than Dock Place
is the Port o' Leith jail.
No. I'll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I'm sure -
I won't end up on Dock Place
and I'll never be a hure.

Jack's Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he'd never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn't look like such a bad place to end up - not to Jack, not anymore. (The "hures," if they'd ever been there, had moved on.)"

The hures have moved on and us creative types have moved in, but it certainly isn't such a bad place to end up.

Everyone in Leith pays attention to tone of voice - even the gangs.

The media planning is pretty good too. The site is at 90 degrees to Leith Walk, directly facing the heavy, slow moving oncoming traffic.

Gangs are bad, obviously.

Leith Walk has more than its fair share of quirky shops, which either have fun names, or which offer niche services, or both.

Take Borlands for example. They spotted a gap in the market for a combined snooker, darts and TV repair business.

Then you have a hydroponics business that pays homage to the Proclaimers in its name.

Or the planner's favourite, which actually sells telescopes and such like.

The betting shop whose name can not be mentioned.

And, continuing the theme of the bard, Leith Walk's favourite combined book and record store.

We liked Elvis Shakespeare so much that we did and ad for them last year.

The guy who cut my hair last week represented Great Britain in gymnastics at the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games.

In his spare time he's now a semi-professional break-dancer (or B-Boy).

He also survived a house fire last year.

It beat the hell out of the usual, banal haircut conversation.

The Water of Leith path runs from, surprise surprise, Leith to just down the road from the Blonde office. How convenient is that? It runs alongside the river on what used to be a railway line. It makes for fast, easy and safe cycling twixt Leith and Blonde and is helping me to save about £1,500 a year in taxi fares up and down the hill.

You see some funny things in Leith. My favourite sighting to date was a man, dressed as a tourist with the trademark heavy backpack, pausing to look out over the water on the Bernard Street bridge over the Water of Leith.

When I walked past him, I noticed that what looked for all the world like a backpack containing his worldy possessions, was actually a backpack containing, of all things, a parrot. It was sitting quite happily on its perch inside the rucksack, watching the world go by. Fairly surreal as sightings go. Needless to say, I didn't have my camera to hand.

But I think even this sight of strangeness was excelled a couple of weeks ago when 1,500 rubber ducks floated carefree down the Water of Leith to the astonishment of onlookers one slightly hazy Sunday afternoon.

Stockbridge has an annual rubber duck race on their stretch of the Water of Leith. But once the winning duck has passed the finishing line, the race organisers gather downstream scooping the losing ducks up into huge nets.

This year, dramatically, disaster struck. The nets burst with the weight of the oncoming ducks so they drifted on, all 1,500 of them, unencumbered all the way through Leith and out to sea.

I wish desperately I had been sitting slightly hungover outside one of the lovely shoreside pubs as the sea of ducks swept past. I'll have to mark the date in my diary next year. Just in case. And maybe I'll manage to carry my camera with me then too.