What do you think Edinburgh used to smell of? At various periods it has smelled of horse shit, human poo, wood smoke, coal smoke, tobacco smoke, Brasso, fish, gunpowder, flowers, ink, books and blood. When I came to live here it always smelled of boiling hops, especially in the Canongate. Sometimes people used to be able to smell the freshness of the Forth and even, they say, the yellow broom on the hills of Fife.
Now it smells of coffee, and coffee alone. Not even tea! Tea is dead. Tea—dead, in Edinburgh. Think. That must mean that all the Morningside ladies in pretty hats have died, along with all the railway workers in dungarees and bandannas. Who has replaced them? I will tell you: Alien Beings. Coffee is the fluid exuded by the nasty, half-fleshy, half-mechanical probes of these Beings, the Marketers from Outer Space, who came in their coffee bean pods and have taken over our city.
The first thing they did was make a tunnel. Aliens always do that. They bored a tunnel from the Royal Scottish Academy to the National Gallery. This ‘space’, as they call it, was created in order to sell coffee, because no one cares about art any more and you have to use the buildings for something!
The tunnel drips with the dark brown slime of capitalism. The other day I followed an old couple around—the kind of old couple you see around the galleries, all dry-cleaned and not speaking to each other even though they have rosy cheeks. They had coffee at the National Gallery, the City Art Centre and the National Museum and they never looked at a picture. Because they were stoned. On coffee.
c r o w s .
Coffee is the tool by which the Marketers have turned our hallowed institutions into our hollow institutions.
The National Gallery’s web site is full of crowing. It crows that the ‘Gardens Entrance’ (the tunnel of slime) ‘offers spectacular views over Princes Street Gardens’. It does not. The windows are obscured with garish painted-on signs advertising coffee. As if to bolster this crassness, large A-boards advertising coffee have been placed in the Gardens for us to stumble over. As if you couldn’t see the gigantic lettering in the windows of the restaurant, or you laughably and miserably and mistakenly assumed that here was a large public building in Edinburgh where you couldn’t buy coffee. These A-boards are now stumbled and fallen over in front of every god damn business in our city. But they are not merely stumble-boards. They are the egg-cases of the Marketers.
g u n n e r a .
The Marketers from Outer Space have laid many eggs in the Royal Botanic Garden. Here the soil is most conducive to their reproductive milt. This will be obvious to any observant citizen, as every time one visits the Garden there is less plant matter and more SIGNAGE. These signs are now an organism unto themselves, self-fertilizing and generating, having been grafted with the prolific and hideous Gunnera manicata near the East Gate. The signage organism is sentient and is planning to take over the entire Garden, if not the whole of our city. Several months ago, large signboards announcing a temporary closure of the glasshouses erected themselves overnight.
Sometimes the signage uses ideograms of people peeing, or buying something, or cups of coffee. Sometimes the signs eat children.
The Garden, in its wisdom (botanists on the board of directors already replaced by Marketer pod-people) built a galumphing new facade at the west side, the ‘Gateway of Faint Hope’. This frightening structure was stated to be for ‘educational purposes’, the same dishonest reason given by the Gallery pod-people for their slime-cavern. But ‘museum education’ is just marketing. The main purpose of the Gateway is to sell coffee, which was already being sold by the gallon just a few metres away.
a r s e q u a r t e r .
The Marketers have determined that culture must be contained—it is a threat to them, after all. Therefore we must have an ‘arts quarter’. This used to be called Grindlay Street. The arrival of the idea of the arts quarter was signalled by the appearance of a terrifying glass goitre on the side of the Usher Hall. No, not a goiter—since the Usher Hall used to be a place of mentation and pleasure, let’s say a tumour, literally a brain tumour on the left temporal lobe of the Usher Hall, a sober but previously considerable Beaux-Arts building. The purpose of this goitre or tumour is the vending of coffee.
The Royal Lyceum theatre suffered a similar internal haemorrhage; the Traverse, medico-historically speaking, succumbed to coffee long ago; it is said to float on an underground lake of it. What untold riches!
m a c c h i a t o : t h e s m e l l o f f e a r .
The National Library of Scotland is no longer run by librarians but by baristas. The Library smells not of morocco, which is to say of literature, but of cappuccino, which is to say of money. And money is the smell of hubris. They’ve put out wanky metal tables on the sidewalk on George IV Bridge, to stumble over, and where scholars may cool their lattes at most times of the year and attempt to smoke in the gale. (Since we’re ruining our city, o Marketers, what happened to smoking? It’s just as bad for you as coffee and vodka – for quite a while in its history Edinburgh smelled like one big wet Craven “A” – yet it gets short shrift now.)
The whole building, the entire national collection, and, by extension, the totality of our cultural heritage, in every venue, now reeks of arabica.
n e w t o n i a n g a g g i a m e c h a n i c s .
The upper galleries at Modern Two are located directly above the giant coffee machine in the shape of Isaac Newton on the ground floor (one of the largest espresso machines in the shape of a polymath bending over ever constructed in the former United Kingdom) so that you cannot think about art (even though it’s usually only Paolozzi), but are instead driven to distraction by the rank fumes of burning coffee and the thought maybe of one of those little polenta cakes. These rooms are obscured in a haar of espresso.
p a r t y !
There is one odour of present-day Edinburgh that can (briefly) come out on top of coffee, and that is the smell of a stag night. They let these things happen in the Grassmarket, because a] the city fathers, their bodies and spinal cords inhabited by the alien marketers, have given up on the Old Town, and b] the city fathers think the smell of a stag night can be contained there. On any Thursday, Friday or Saturday night the smell of coffee, now so necessary to life itself, may be held temporarily at bay at the West Bow, Candlemaker Row and the West Port by the heady aromatic cocktail of – you know – cocktails, made of improbable juices, and the spew thereof; lager, vodka (which triumphed over whiskey at the bidding of the pod people), ‘Lynx’, tough gels and muds for man fringe, bad curry, worse pizza, pee, poo, phlegm, sweat, spit, sperm and mobile phones. Mobile phones have a stench.
Would you rather, you can hear people say, would you rather share the city with the noisome rabble of the XVIII century? Half out of their minds on whiskey and small-beer and candle-wax and snuff and syphilis and pies stuffed with God knows what? Yes. I would. At least they made up their own minds.
s c i e n c e f i c t i o n o r s c i e n c e f a c t ?
Coffee, the dark, corrosive semen of the Marketers from Outer Space has conquered everything. It’s beaten out water, tea, beer, whiskey and wine (don’t make me laugh). It’s conquered the human need for food: whenever a restaurant closes, it’s replaced by a coffee shop. Or a pub, which is then replaced by a coffee shop. Coffee is everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. We literally live and breathe it and it keeps us marching in step with our alien marketing masters.
It’s weird, isn’t it? We nurture these delicate little fruits at a specially correct altitude. They can only grow in a few places in the balance of the world. Then we RIP them from their branches and banish them thousands of miles from their home. We roast them, scorch fuck out of them, shove them in a bag and vacuum suck ’em. We crush them, grind them, pulverize them, boil them, steam pressure them, drink the paltry fluid that is the result of this all this backbreaking agony, and then throw it all in the trash as fast as damn it.
A love of truth demands the admission that the coffee brought to the city by the Beings is flavourful. Before, there were only Bird’s and Camp coffee. READY – AYE – READY. We have been brought into the space age, a dawn of aesthetics, only to be killed. But the only really good coffee in the world is to be had at ‘El Pato’, Calle de los Hermanos Moroy, Logroño. That’s in Spain, so forget it.
t h e p r e s e n t c o f f e e – d u a l i t y .
The existing coffee-duality may be explained in this way: it’s in the architecture of our precious cultural institutions, right there in the fabric of the Usher Hall, where the function of the building (art, the important and adorable art of music) has been deemed too beautiful. And therefore subversive: so the building and its threatening function have been enclosed, cocooned, or as we said before the Usher Hall has been given a tumour, into which you rush at the interval, and where your mind is scrambled and derailed from art. And, conveniently, further huge sums of money are removed from your pocket, vast sums beyond the increasingly exorbitant amounts one has to pay for art in our city. So the real function of coffee is to destroy art, to ruin thought at the precise moment art should be apprehended, and to exhaust the purses of the people.
Amnesia and schizophrenia are the ultimate objects of the existing coffee-duality. Indeed, you might even view these coffee excrescences on our important buildings not merely as tumours but remoras. The symbiotic economy of the Usher Hall and its coffee-remora is now permanently joined.
(By the way, initial reports that the Debacle-Trams, conceived and constructed by the Marketer-Beings, actually run on coffee have thankfully been disproven. But what were we to think when we observed the suspicious number of cafes lining the scenically paltry yet lushly funded route of the Debacle-Trams?)
f l u s h w i t h s u c c e s s .
Since there is nothing to be done about this until the End of Time, or until the day some simple bacterium attacks all the Marketers in our town, there can be only one outcome. Enclose all Edinburgh in a typically ugly council-funded, architect-designed glass carapace, goitre or excresence. In fact, architects be damned – only a Claes Oldenburg would be able to effect the apotheosis of Edinburgh that the Marketers want: the city enclosed in a vast lavatory pan, twice daily filled to the gunwales with scalding Americano. After a decade or so of this scarifying, this near-drowning every day, we will have forgotten what our jobs are, who we are, even what art is. And that is just where the Marketers from Outer Space want us.
In the mornings the hundred thousand gallons of Americano is flushed away with the collected piss of the stag and hen parties. At night with vodka. Or perhaps, in time, with song.
Todd McEwen is the author of five novels. He lives in Edinburgh.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. I]
