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I contributed to a google map of soundscapes in Edinburgh for a group called "Drift and Derive (with an accent)" which meet ups regularly to explore the city in interesting ways. I chose to go up Calton Hill, which is in the centre of Edinburgh next to Princess Street. Once you get up there you are removed from the hubbub of the city with wonderful views of Arthur's Seat. With its half-built 'National Monument' based on the Acropolis and once called 'Edinburgh's Shame' as the project ran out of money before completion,  the hill is a place of refuge for half-finished projects and the personal follies within us all. When I first came to Edinburgh, I'm embarrassed to admit I built a superstition around Calton Hill. I made a pact with myself that if I went up, I would move away from Edinburgh. Nevertheless, a year or so later, there I was, up on Calton Hill with some friends of mine who had come to visit Edinburgh. Calton Hill must be far too rational a rock from to go in for superstition, however, as I am still a resident of Edinburgh. A visit to Calton Hill, though, is a reminder of my ongoing ambivalence to staying here.

This time on my visit to Calton Hill, I tuned in to the sounds around me. I sat on a bench with a view to Arthur's Seat and listened to the tourists who were taking selfies. There was a millstone the tourists would step onto to take their photos. For half an hour, I sat and listened, not understanding a single sentence of the many different languages spoken. I enjoyed their ritual of taking selfies, which I appreciated as an investment of time and energy, skill and love. The intricacies of relations has to be symbolically recorded, acknowledged and reflected upon in the selfie ritual. This took often many minutes for each party, and much communication that went over my head. It began to sound like a musical score. Only the English words "3, 2, 1" were woven deftly into one woman's conversation, as she readied her sister for the next photo, of which there were many, usurping her own language with the global language of the selfie. The three words spoken were like a pendulum, ever returning to the same place. In the same way, the tourists were attracted to the millstone, to the stage it gave them, consecrating their outdoor photo booth, again and again, first in front of the craggy landscape, then, turning around, against the National Monument. I began to wonder at the millstone. Who brought it up here?  Did they think of selfies whoever brought it up here, relinquishing the millstone to the tourist's ever-growing demands for their self-affirming ritual? When the millstone was free, I got up on it, and took a selfie, just as I had observed the others doing. I felt at home among the tourists. For me, the tourist attraction was the tourist themselves. It was certainly nice to be surrounded by foreign languages as an antidote to Brexit, insular Britain and small-mindedness. In this way, Calton Hill was rather a haven from half-finished projects and follies on a grand scale.

When I returned from Calton Hill, I mixed and looped the conversations I'd heard. Now disembodied, the voices sounded urgent and haunting from a time and place never to be repeated. In the recording, the woman counts down the "3, 2, 1" against the sound of a kiss, a woman laughing, a man talking in Spanish, and a woman saying 'Holyrood'. Through the recording, each of these ordinary moments become the expectant outcome, the great event, the solution, the reason, though of what is never revealed.

Thanks to Ewan and Michelle for organising.


You can hear the soundscape here, best heard on headphones as the quality is not the best.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Edinburgh

Having recently relocated to Edinburgh, I have been getting used to the new everyday sounds around me. No longer am I surrounded by the German language, but by English. The morning birdsong outside my window was replaced by a disorienting sound of seagulls, their melancholy screech echoing around the communal greens of tenement living. Police sirens sound different here too. The German police cars' perfunctory two-tone missive has given way to a sliding wail interrupted by a punctuated monotone, and in its third movement, erupts into a sound like a car accelerator wired to a wah wah pedal. In Germany, the siren went wonkily out of tune in direct relation to its distance from me as it sped away, reminding me that I was an outsider, out of synch with my surroundings but enjoying it.

Over the last 14 years of living abroad I realise my ears have become trained to believe that English is a rare occurrence. I automatically eavesdrop on stranger's conversations, lingering on their words. Something has not told my brain to stop doing this, so I am a sounding board for anyone's conversation.

I think: There is someone speaking English, that's unusual, I wonder who they are and why they are here?
Of course as anyone with experience of being an expat knows, you may feel the opposite, especially if living in Berlin: English speakers again, the place is verily overrun with 'em!

I stare for a moment too long and realise I am intruding.

Then there are the new sounds in the flat. The fire alarm goes off, there is even a detector in the kitchen, toast is the culprit. We can't get away from the ear-piercing sound, it is in every room and even the stair. My children run around in a panic, hands clasped over ears and escape into the garden. There is no deactivate button and we are told later that you must fling a towel towards it in the hope that it stops. Later, on a walk through the meadows, bordered on one side by glass fronted luxury flats, a man is balanced precariously on a stool in his showcase kitchen, waving a towel frantically upwards.  I smile in recognition. I have been initiated into that kind of Highland fling. I don't think this is what he wanted the world to see through the glass, though.

Then there is the sound that is inaudible to the human ear. We have mice. I now realise why there are so many cats prowling the greens. I won't buy a trap that kills. We try a humane trap, but it seems that the Edinburgh mice are clever fellows and won't fall for that. I am sold a plug that emits high-pitched frequencies that will stop mice nesting. I wonder if death would have been better than animal sound torture, but then the Edinburgh mice, astute creatures they are, must have taken to wearing ear-plugs as I catch one scuttling under the washing machine at night.

Tenement living also brings close proximity to the sound of our neighbours. The reliable sonorous chimes of a grandfather clock are incongruous to the occasional screeching of its owner, an elderly lady from the ground floor flat telling off our children for scaling a wall. What we know so far of our Spanish neighbour is relayed to us by an alarm clock that doesn't turn off in the morning, and a security alarm setting loudly at night.

Intelligent mice, useful towels, all we need now are Babel fish! I find myself struggling for English words again, and asking myself, "What was the English word for that, again?" The effort of communicating in a foreign language, though, falls away when you relocate. It is as comforting as going up a few togs in an eiderdown. You can enjoy the nuances of your own language, rather than casting around for scraps. Funnily enough, it was in the "famine" rather that "feast" environment in Germany, that I really first learned about the English language, teaching English as a foreign language. Now that I am back in the UK,though, I realise it is my own language that has to be brushed up.