All of the middle-to-top-floor residents of No. 10 Luckenbooth Close would have been witness to even more. They would have seen a changing vista all year round. Pink skies. Yellow dawns. Snow rolling in to drown the city white. Drunken women out on hen do’s singing away over on George Street. Street performers trying to make money. Comedians seeking fame. Bin lorries trundling down cobbles, all grim in the wee hours. Protestors marching. Dark cars driving politicians to places where they can’t be seen. Steamy buses. Folks from all over the Lothians coming to work in town, or go out to dinner, or do business, or drink, or shoplift, or visit the council, or take buses to the airport so they can fly the fuck out of here. Bodies found. Knifes in hands. Fists raised. Deals done. The sound of a woman crying on empty streets. A front bell ringing at the massage parlour. The upstairs and downstairs, the rich and the poor – they won’t ever stop its darkness. It’s a city of duality. Lack of investment in communities perpetuates it. Edinburgh is all seasons and movement – space, breadth – modern, ancient – experiment, tradition – conservatives, crooks, academics, bakers, curators, beggars, all the many graves seen and unseen. It is a most uncompromising city. And Dot is entirely alone in it and nobody wants her.

Dot smiles to herself sadly.

She has love in her heart for this city.

No matter how many bad things have happened to her here.

It is her home.

She is an errant daughter who always returns.

On the outside of the tenement, two stone faces on the belfry sneer at all of it – stone features all bashed-in by the north wind. Dot has a feeling she might be the last to see them. Those gargoyles have held that pose fir hundreds of years. Up on rooftops all over this city there are angels and cherubs and saints and sinners and gargoyles and little stone creatures. Dot is more fir them than the humans. Get rid of the humans. Planet – take yersel back – let all this shit decay! Dot picks up a marble. Sits it on the floor. It rolls quickly away from her. The building is sliding forward too quickly. Fireworks bang outside. The bells will be here soon. Tomorrow will be cold. There will be no bright sky. She can feel it in her bones. Even the cars appear forlorn in that kind of grey. Every year around March, or sometimes April, there is a fear that spring may not come at all.

Often she arrives – late and unrepentant.

She is as brash as only a goddess who brings forth new life can be.

The city is primeval, tired, corrupt – occasionally brilliant, true – held hostage by seasons.

Dot does not question why summer has commitment issues.