I was born here, I tell my children, whenever we are back in Edinburgh, visiting their granny and passing by on the top deck of the number 27 bus. That building, there. That one. The big fancy one that looks like a castle, looks like a wizard or a queen lives there. No, the big fancy one on the other side of the street. Yes. There. I was born there.  

I keep on telling them this, every summer, when we visit. I’m not sure why because the idea of me being born means nothing to them. I was not born. I am their mother. Permanent, eternal, always was and will be. They are sure of that. This building doesn’t read “hospital” really. Not to my children: the 1970s brutalist block they were born in, in a town near us on the west coast, that’s a hospital. What does a hospital need with turrets and curliques? With crow stepped gables and weather vanes?  

I was born here, somewhere. After so much redesign and modernisation who knows which bit was the maternity ward in 1980? They will have scrubbed the blood out of the floors long ago.  My hips dislocated on the way out, so my mother was kept in here longer than her ward mates while they fixed me up, disorientated to be a patient in the building she’d done her medical training in, but I got to leave eventually, a tiny skelf of a baby with a full head of hair and a pelvis encased in massive yellow splints. A privilege, to get to leave a hospital.  

I was born here, and then I didn’t go back in again, throughout my whole childhood. Babies and adults only, at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. No children. Every Friday, when school finished at 12.30,  we would drift up Middle Meadow Walk, past the great gorgeous flank of this place, part of a flotilla, linked at the elbows, talking with our hands in big, confident gestures, blocking the way, headed for  the basement sofas of a cafe on the Mound – now a tartan tat shop of course. We were young, we didn’t turn out heads. Growing up in a UNESCO heritage site, where all the buildings are protected for their beauty, the sort of place the world would howl and mourn for, paint their profile pictures saltire blue if any one of these ornate, ancient bricks got damaged – it makes you blasé about other buildings. Functional buildings. Big square ugly hospitals built purely for the purpose of saving lives.  

I was born here. I come from Edinburgh, always, but I have not lived here for twenty years. My memories are mapped out on the city’s landmarks; I reenter my youth navigating by the position of buildings and bollards. The traffic island on Lothian Road where I broke up with a boyfriend. The upper floors of the Pleasance where I went to after school theatre group.  The nightclub below a church on Victoria Street that let in underagers. When it changes – the ‘canal quarter’ around Fountainbridge is no longer recognisable as the path I rode my bike along, holding my breath  because of the hops stench from the brewery – I become disorientated, struggle to find my way even with Google Maps. But for the most part, I am lucky. Edinburgh does not change. Imagining a time when I look at an aerial map of Edinburgh and mourn its destruction: inconceivable.  

I was born here and I reentered this building at nineteen. I had just finished a waitressing shift, I was wearing my brown velvet jacket with the structured shoulders that made me look grown up. Deliberately. Because I needed to be a grown up, for this.  

The shock of tattiness, behind the facade: the ordinariness of a working hospital, not a castle, paint peeling, institutionally bleached staircase, school dinner stink from the food trolley.  

I spoke to the ward nurse, adult to adult, and she didn’t see through my disguise, directed me to his bed. I hadn’t recognised him in amongst all the other shrunken old men, diminished and humiliated. Swirled boiled blue linoleum patterns,  the squeak of my chair leg, the terrible black bruising over half his his face.  

My grandpa was a man who I never saw comfortable anywhere but his garden; a ward, with other people, some of whom he had to obey, and restrictions on his movement? He hated it here. Throughout our childhood he was the one permanent adult male presence; upper lip carved out of stone, sure, but always there. This stroke and fall was the first sign of his end approaching and in a ward somewhere round here I had my last conversation with the old, stoic him. The last of our conversations about entirely practical matters, before dementia yanked out the trauma and loss he’d  ossified, carefully, deliberately, for fifty years. There are two other conversations I remember after that, mapped out on other points of this city: when I stopped him trying to steal a tablecloth during a gleeful rampage around a locked ward at the Astley Ainslie, and when I held his hand as he cried out the three syllables of his dead brother’s name from the plastic chair of his nursing home on Colinton Road. I’ve never visited the memorial stone we had engraved for him at the Mortonhall Crematorium; it’s too far out. Instead, I give him a silent nod from the top deck every time the number 27 rounds the corner onto Lauriston Place. I can pay my homage here because of the permanence of this building. It always will be. 

The privilege, eh? The privilege of being born here, in a beautiful building in a city famous around the world for its beauty, in a country that nobody dares to try and destroy. The sort of building that is so beautiful trusts are set up to ensure it will continue to exist, to contain futures and Futures Institutes whilst still being a tangible marker of the pasts of the people of the city who were born and sickened and recovered and died here.  

The privilege of knowing that your beautiful cityscapes will always exist, that a building is a permanent thing. The privilege of thinking of a hospital as a safe place.  

Imagine another hospital in another city. Let’s call it Al-Shifa, because that was its name. You have to imagine it, because it isn’t there any more. Hasn’t been since April, so nobody can ever again point to it from a bus, with their children, and say “I was born here”. Imagine a hospital where the tiny skelfs of newborn babies and the confused, humiliated old men didn’t get to go home.  

The Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, at one point in the post-hospital life that it got to have, once had a lovely independent bookshop here, in the courtyard that all hospitals seem to have built in. Spaces for patients to walk, recuperate gently, breathe air that doesn’t carry disease.  I launched my first novel here, in April 2015. Old friends came, walked their own memory maps of the city to get here. We drank wine. Oh, it was very civilised.  And now this courtyard hosts a book festival – the Book Festival. The most Edinburghy event in all of Edinburgh. They pitched the Spiegeltent right in the centre.  

Imagine that other hospital. It had a courtyard too, before the last bombs flattened it, reduced the distinction between “courtyard” and “hospital building” to nothing. In May 2024, aid workers found a pit in the courtyard. Right in the centre. A new mass grave filled with bodies of patients: the old men from the stroke wards, the disorientated new mothers, newborns whose incubators had been turned off. With the ward nursers and medical students who had worked there, with the children who had been sheltering behind those big, thick, no-longer permanent hospital walls. Some of them had their hands cable tied behind their backs.  

I was born here, and I take for granted that I will always be able to return to the building in the city I was born in, and chart my history, a history that began somewhere in this big beautiful structure, by its landmarks. Permanent. Eternal.  Always was and will be. Because, by some stroke of luck, I was not born there.