44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh

One of my most refreshing pleasures is to live a while with the occupants of the flats at 44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh, and their friends and acquaintances. The latest instalment is "Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers" in which Bertie turns 7; his appalling mother Irene wins a prize air trip to Dubai where she is confined in a sheik's harem in the desert and starts a book club for the sheik's wives; Angas Lordie's sleepwalking is cured by a single consultation with Pat's father, the psychiatrist Dr McGregor, who acquires an email-ordered companion from the Czech Republic; Pat falls in love with a handsome furniture-maker; Angas Lordie's wife Domenica is visited by their former neighbour Antonia and Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiore di Montagna, her aphorism-prone fellow-nun; Matthew and Elspeth and their triplets Rognvald, Tobermory, and Fergus (indistinguishable except for their names, and Matthew has mixed them up at least once so their birth order is now unknowable); their au pair Anna from Denmark and their au pair's Danish au pair Birgitte, relocate from India Street to a manor house in the Pentland Hills, Big Lou takes on a foster child, Finlay, who becomes Bertie's protector; and under Alexander McCall Smith's gentle, occasionally profound plot-weaving, (almost) everyone is happy and content. This partial synopsis is my attempt to explain why  the 44 Scotland Street books are my favourites of all the delightfully inventive series by the prodigiously prolific emeritus professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh.

The 44 Scotland Street series (9 books so far) describe the lives and times of the occupants of the 8 flats at 44 Scotland Street. Wendy and I lived in a comparable commodious flat at 22 Eyre Crescent, just around the corner from Scotland Street, for several months in 2002; there’s no #44. Bertie Pollock, the ‘gifted 6-year-old’ lives with his ultra feminist Mum and his statistician Dad in one of these flats. Other characters live in the 7 other flats in the building, or nearby. “The Sunday Philosophy Club” is the 1st book in the Isabel Dalhousie series, also set in Edinburgh, also 9 books so far; each of the Isabel Dalhousie series comes nearest to containing a ‘cosy mystery’ but that’s not why I read them. McCall Smith is a distinguished bioethicist, and he smuggles ethical conundrums into both series, and into his other books about the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency (15 so far) set in Botswana. I’m addicted to the two series set in Edinburgh because they massage my nostalgia for that loveliest of cities, because Alexander McCall Smith writes very well, because they are gently humorous - and occasionally hilarious - and because they are about basically decent people, even the appalling Irene Pollock, who means well but is the worst mother ever for a little boy who just wants to be a normal little boy, not a gender-neutral child as his Mum aspires to mould him to be. I’d hoped to meet Alexander McCall Smith when the University of Edinburgh gave me an honorary doctoral degree in 2003, but he attended the convocation for the faculty of law, not the faculty of medicine where I got my robe, hood and parchment. He must be a remarkable man, well into his 80s now, still churning out several very well written, well-plotted, always thought provoking books every year. He types his books rather than using a word-processor, and one of his neighbours told me that on summer evenings when everyone’s windows are open, they hear his typewriter tapping away every night, far into the night. He inserts real people, other Edinburgh writers like Ian Rankin for instance, for minor walk-on parts in his Edinburgh-based stories.