Capital Christmas Stories

With Jane Riddell, Anne Stenhouse and Jennifer Young I am part of Capital Writers – four writers who live in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city.

Edinburgh, renowned for many things over the centuries, is now also famous for its Christmas/New Year festivities (anyone tried this year’s silent disco on George Street …?).

So it seemed appropriate that we produce an anthology of festive stories and here it is, available from Amazon at the very cheery price of 99p:

And here is a review by Joanne Baird of Portobello Book Blog

This is how my story begins:

UNDER THE CHRISTMAS TREE

Princes Street. George Street. Moray Place. Castle Street. Hanover Street.

Jessica blinked and looked again at the map she’d just been given in the tourist office.

Edinburgh was over 11,000 miles away, but in front of her were many of the same street names – albeit in a different configuration.

Sophie had only given her vague instructions about how to get to where she lived on Wallace Street, walkable she’d said from the centre of the city. Jessica had left home twenty-four hours ago, the time now a blur of airports and trying to sleep in cramped seats, and her head swam as she scanned the map for the street whose name was yet another reminder that Dunedin, New Zealand, was named after Scotland’s capital.

She took the map over to the assistant behind the desk. He swivelled it round towards him and made a pencil circle.

‘There,’ he said, marking a spot that actually didn’t look too far to walk and then helpfully pointing out the route. ‘Start here, at Stuart Street. About twenty minutes’ walk? Or there’s a taxi rank on the other side of the road.’

Any thought that a walk would clear her head – and postpone the moment of seeing her sister – was dispelled when Jessica saw that Stuart Street was vertical, so vertical she imagined herself having to scale it like a mountaineer while trying to hang on to her wheeled suitcase. Did people really live up there? Edinburgh was hilly but this was in a different league.

So, she wouldn’t walk. But she could still put off arriving at Sophie’s; she’d spotted a café when she got off the shuttle bus from the airport.

Over a long black coffee, which served to wake her brain up a little, she tried to think what she would say to her sister, what platitudes she could come out with this time to comfort her. And she wondered if Sophie would realise that Jessica herself might be in need of comforting.

Would Sophie remember what had happened to Jessica last Christmas? Would she wonder why her hysterical phone call home a month ago, crying that Logan had left her, had resulted in Jessica, uncharacteristically impulsive, saying she’d book a flight and come to New Zealand for Christmas? Just her, not David. No, she wouldn’t wonder; she would take it for granted that her older sister would drop everything – including her husband – so that Sophie wouldn’t be on her own over the festive season.

Now read on …