Churches

Although I'm a bit of a heathen who's more inclined to worship trees than pay homage to a superior being, I do love old churches. Edinburgh is full of churches from the 18th and 19th centuries, many of which have intimate little graveyards attached. Now that there are fewer stern Calvinists to fill the pews, more and more churches have been sold or leased and converted to a variety of secular uses.

Oddly, more than a few are doing business as casinos, which is beyond irony. There's a beautiful specimen tucked into a corner in Shandwick Place, still blackened with soot from the Auld Reekie days. Its excess of decoration suggests it was built during Queen Victoria's reign, with ornate carving in every crevice and a lovely arched doorway, now spoiled by signs enticing people in to squander their money on fruit machines. Another Victorian next to the Playhouse Theatre at the top of Leith Walk has had its big heavy doors replaced with plate glass ones, which look absurdly out of place encased by heavily carved stone arches. I don't know what its current role is, or what kind of horrors have happened to its interior. Up the road a bit is another one, now used as a mosque.

Two churches at the west end are still used as churches though and I've mentioned one of them - St. Cuthbert's - before. I often walk through the beautiful old graveyard en route to Princes Street Gardens. Next to St. Cuthbert's, on the corner of Princes Street and Lothian Road, is what was once St. John the Episcopal but is now St. John the Evangelist, although its sign indicates it's still an Episcopalian church. I don't know what the difference is. For me, the word evangelist always conjures up Tammy Faye Bakker with her straw hair and 85 coats of mascara but I haven't seen her loitering in the vicinity.

I haven't been inside either church, although St. John's has a sign outside welcoming people in to look around and, one of these days, I will. While waiting for my bus home during the dark nights in December, the lovely stained glass windows were lit from within and I could feast my eyes on the gorgeous colours of those on my left and the castle lit up on its rock in front of me.

In the bowels of St. John's are a row of little shops selling tasteful gifts (from third world countries) and spiritual books. In one of these spaces is a coffee shop where I go sometimes if it's raining at lunch time, to read my book and have a cup of tea and a scone. Its ceilings are low and arched, built with bricks, and not much light comes in so it's always a bit gloomy. The tables and chairs are mismatched; the chairs not very comfortable, tables covered with grubby tablecloths. It tried to be a vegetarian restaurant for a while but the food was so weird, it just never caught on and the sign outside now announces new management. Nothing much seems different though, except they now sell sandwiches with meat in them.

The clientele seem much the same as before - an odd assortment of elderly women, middle-aged-to-elderly men wearing threadbare tweed jackets and polished brogues, and glasses with gigantic lenses. What is it with old men and the glasses taking up half the real estate on their face? Sometimes there are thirty-something mothers with babies or toddlers, having earnest conversations with a friend while spooning homemade baby food into the child. And there's me, of course - chunky middle-aged Jacko with crazy-madwoman spiked hair. Stylish glasses though.

I don't know why I keep going there really. The tea and coffee are rubbish and overpriced and I once foolishly risked having lunch there, which shattered any expectations I might have had of decent food. For £2.75, I got a shallow bowl of thin beige gruel trying to pass itself off as mushroom soup, accompanied by an allegedly homemade roll, the dough flecked with black specks. Chopped herbs? Charred paper? Insect bits? I ate it anyway. Their scones, on the other hand, are perfect. They're clearly freshly made (nothing worse than a scone more than a few hours out of the oven), with a dense cakey interior and a perfect crustiness on the outside. It seems blasphemous to have to eat them with the erzatz, fruit-free jam that comes in little plastic things. Cold, firm unsalted butter with my own homemade peach or strawberry jam would push them over the edge from delectable to sublime.

It's this kind of talk that made me chunky.