the playfair steps

The postcard comes to us from Edinburgh by way of Brittany: Anna Dickie took the photo, and Lucy Kempton added the words. It’s a bit of spillover from a collaboration for qarrtsiluni, which they discussed in some detail there. The photo depicts the Playfair Steps in Edinburgh, which lead up to the Old Town, with a view over the city. Lucy told us:

There’s a Youth Hostel nearby, and I remembered a story my nephew told of when he was in Ediburgh, and a girl he got friendly with urged him to come up on the roof of the hostel where they were staying (I don’t know if it was the Playfair one), where, she said, the lights of the city at night were very beautiful. He declined, but saw her the next night with another boy, and heard afterwards she had gone up there and fallen to her death. This was in my mind as I wrote the poem.

I used Picasa’s text function, aiming at a kind of streetlight yellow, and grading the size of the font to match the perspective of the steps.