I used to walk through the Cowgate every week day on my way to work. I would trudge up in the morning and then back down again in the evening. Daily I would pass by the big, black/brown doors of this building, the hum of the machinery inside drowned out by the constant growl of the passing traffic.
During the summer months the doors of this building would gradually become plastered in posters and flyers for various Fringe shows on at the Edinburgh Festival. Sometimes one of them would catch my attention and maybe even make me think of going to that show, but most of the time I just trudged by on my way to or back from the misery that was my horrible job.
One year it just seemed to rain non-stop. I got soaked twice a day on my commute to and from work and was constantly dodging away from the huge puddles on the road, to try and avoid the dirty water spray from the passing cars. There was a particularly nasty puddle near to this building and I quickly learnt to watch and wait for a gap in the traffic before hurriedly skittering past it.
I also did get to see lots of wonderful and weird things on my walk. There was the fox who use to stroll down the pavement in the morning. He wasn’t bothered by passing pedestrians like myself, he just trotted on to wherever he was going. There were occasionally semi-naked Pagans tripping back from some hippie happening in Holyrood, blue people with flowers in their hair and grass stains on the little clothing they wore. Sometimes there were performers returning home from an early morning/late night show or a night on the town. Their stage make up smeared and their eyes bleary with the excesses of the Festival. Then there was the old drunk, always immaculately attired in a suit and tie, who sang folk songs to himself and would wave hello to me as he drank his first bottle of strong cider of the day. Often there was a little gathering of people, who had just left one of the nearby hostels, and were huddled up in the shelter of the stairwell at High School Yards. Some quietly contemplating life, others arguing, some drinking and always a couple at the back with the silver foil out and lighters going as they prepared to shoot up. Then, every Monday morning, there was the procession of private ambulances making their way to the mortuary in the Cowgate to drop off all the sudden deaths from that weekend. I could always tell if there had been a murder or suspicious death by the number of police cars parked outside. And of course, each year, just after the Festival and Fringe, there were the confused looking students, newly arrived and trying to work out how they could get to where they were meant to be going. For the first week of the new term all the clubs in the Cowgate would have 'Fresher’s Nights' and every morning that week the pavement would be a multi-coloured, slippery carpet of spew.
Once, around Halloween time, as I walked to work, I saw a trail of bloody footprints that started almost at the entrance of the substation building. The footprints of small, bare feet went on up through the Cowgate to Guthrie Street, where they stopped. In my mind I could picture a werewolf, bloody from a night hunting, transforming back into its human form and trudging home. The sort of macabre image of the dark goings on of All Hallows’ Eve. They were probably though, the footprints of someone who had been dancing in ill-fitting shoes and taken them off when their feet got too sore.
Anyway, back to the substation - there’s actually very little I know about this building other than inside it is busy working away providing electricity for a chunk of Edinburgh’s Old Town. It is functional and unloved. Its doors are a sometime hoarding for posters and its walls are a sometimes canvas for graffiti. These same walls have been pissed against by generations of drunken men making their way home from boozy nights out. It is one of those buildings that is just there doing what it was designed to do.
I left the Skulferatu that accompanied me on my walk in a gap in the side wall of the building, by a drainpipe.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude 55.948537
Longitude
-3.186055
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and photographs are copyright of © Kevin Nosferatu, unless otherwise specified.
