They used to throw their piss and shit out the windows.

Once in the morning, once at night, they’d shout a warning for anyone below to get out the way, gardyloo! They are still doing it in parts of the city so I hear say, or they use outdoor toilets, but if they throw it out the windows it’s kind of an organized thing – the daily shit slinging.

Hours were allocated so you would not take a walk – while hundreds of pots of crap were tipped out the windows. People must have been real happy on the High Street when it rained back then to get the streets a bit cleaner, apparently the shit flowed downhill toward Nor Loch, then they’d hang their laundry out of the windows to dry – anyway, that’s you all up to date on what they do or did after taking a crap, the building I am in has toilets and it is nice, No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is as tall as a skyscraper.

They call it a tenement.

There are nine floors in our building, plus a basement and an attic, there’s other buildings nearby that have a good fourteen floors and the basements are damp. Most of them don’t lead into catacombs like No. 10 Luckenbooth Close does. Mr Udnam says the entrance way is boarded up down there but if you go into the catacombs under this city from any other access point (there are some under the arches in the train station) you won’t be seen again. This is no exaggeration. They used to take bodies through the catacombs to sell to lecturers at the Royal College of Surgeons. I don’t know how much they got per body. I don’t know how many bodies they wheeled under these fine streets but I hear it was a lot. The poster boys for murder-to-order trade in bodies were Burke and Hare. They have a pub named after them now. As you may be able to tell the sense of humor here is dark. Even Princes Street which is so grand and pretty would have bodies getting wheeled underneath it, the good medical students needed corpses to cut up, they are mostly rich kids and if they need dead bodies to dissect then that is what they will get. Education is a big industry in Edinburgh. I do not use the word industry incidentally.

On the way to work today I saw a fishwife.

They are all over the city.

They come from Newhaven.

It’s down by the sea.