Morag’s Apartment

Morag is the name of our temporary Edinburgh landlady.  I know nothing else about her, as the letting agents, with whom we contract, are excessively discrete about their clients.  So all we know is that she is Morag

Her apartment, which she has let to us for the month of the August Edinburgh Festival, is just gorgeous and astonishing.   In a listed building, not far from the city centre, it’s walls are adorned  with original artwork and abundant sculptures.   She must at least be an interior decorator for the decor is just about perfect with soft greys and quite unique wallpapers.   Well, just look at the photographs – we are exceptionally fortunate to have found Morag’s place!

Naturally, we speculate over what it is that Morag does to be able to live in such splendour.    There are some school photographs in the utility room, very formal, the staff and students of an Edinburgh girls’ school.   At least I think its Edinburgh.  So she is perhaps a teacher, an Edinburgh teacher,  even the principal of the girls’ school, she loves Art and music and judging from her cookery books, Italian food.   Is she Jean Brodie? Or a clone or descendent of Miss Jean Brodie?    In fairness her book collection contains nothing that is remotely sympathetic to fascism, so perhaps not.

There are quite a lot of references to fish and the sea, original paintings, sculptures, pottery, cookbooks, even the splash tiles over the kitchen sink are configured to represent the ocean.  And in the utility room wallpaper depicting scenes from a fishing village with fishwives tending the nets and hanging out the fish to dry.  

Perhaps Morag is from one of those remote fishing ports dotted along the North East coast of Scotland.   A fishwife, from a family of fisherfolk.  Maybe she gutted Arbroath Smokies, although there is an absence in the apartment of any rubber boots, oilskin aprons or gutting knives.   In any case, given the exquisite interior of her apartment I would hazard a guess that she is not really an Arbroath Smokie kind of person.  More a salmon and caviar person I should think.

She has a garden.  A most rare and precious feature for an Edinburgh property.  It is a wonderful garden, steep and terraced and entirely private.  A little twist of stone steps lead up to a hidden patch of lawn, surrounded by trees, with just a bench to  furnish the space, which is entirely private and hidden.   No one could know you were there but for the birds and the bees, a place of utter peace.

I spent a while in that garden, on a late summer Edinburgh evening, with a glass of wine and a thin book of verse.  It was perfect.   Of course, it being Edinburgh it started to rain.   I stayed.  It was gentle at first, but began to pour, to drench, to bucket it down as the dark Edinburgh skies unloaded on the city.   I stayed.   I put my arms across the back of the  bench and lifted my face to the Scottish skies.   I was soaked, drenched, my little book of verse was destroyed, the words all soggy, my wine diluted with Edinburgh rain, but it was also wonderful.   One of those magic moments you will always remember, even as they lower your coffin into the cold earth, you will remember and will smile.

 

So we don’t really know who Morag is.   In truth it wouldn’t be too  difficult to search the net and find out all that there is to know  about her.   But I honour her wish to be just Morag and will tell you no more than that, not even where, in Edinburgh, the apartment is located or even where it is near to.

If in some thousand years or so some archaeologist finds  the remains of Morag’s apartment, they will rightly assume it to have been an example of the Scottish cultural treasures of its time .

If anyone finds Morag, then  she is without any doubt, already a Scottish cultural treasure!