Stockbridge has changed since I was mugged by the Cumbie Street Gang

Aidan Smith lived in the Edinburgh area now ranked as the least deprived area in Scotland for five decades

At the Sunday market, the pheasant-burgers were flying off the shelves. No one was being stung by the nettle moisturiser’s asking price and hot cakes – warmed-up croissants with whisky-laced marmalade, organic of course – were selling like the proverbial.

The beautiful people were out in force, snuggle-buggled up against the cold as they moved round the stalls – at least when their £900 Canada Goose jackets and voluminous scarves weren’t causing a blockage in the lanes. It looked like a scene from a Richard Curtis movie and no one happening across it could have been surprised that Edinburgh’s Stockbridge had just been named the least deprived community in Scotland.

Meanwhile, I was trying to remember what the place was like when it was plain and humble Stockaree. On the site of the market there used to be tenements which were pulled down in the 1960s amid high excitement. Kids walking to school for more arithmetic, semolina and the belt had never seen a wrecking-ball do its thing before.

Across the street was a toy shop which only seemed to sell plastic and tin weaponry. We were all desperate to own a Johnny Seven – “Seven guns in one … let’s count ’em!” went the ad – but my pocket money would only stretch to a flame-thrower for Action Man. This did nothing, of course, least of all shoot fire. Essentially, as my father would teasingly point out, Action Man was dressing-up dollies for boys. But I never got the accessory home as I was jumped by the Cumbie Street gang and had it nicked.

Half a century ago, Stockbridge probably wouldn’t have figured quite so high on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) which puts it top of the pops while Greenock languishes in bottom place. Fifty-odd years ago, viewed from the perspective of a furtrimmed Canada Goose hood, you would have called Stockbridge “edgy”. No one used such terminology then, of course. Wherever was home you simply got on as best you could with living, learning which streets to avoid. Now, though, we’re obsessed with league tables and where we figure in them. We crave surveys which tell us how much better we’re doing than some poor schmucks. We get to enjoy European football; they suffer relegation.

SIMD is supposed to highlight which communities need more help to alleviate poverty and you really hope it fulfills this function. But there are critics who argue it’s flawed, that in high-density areas well-off families can be ranked as deprived, enabling them to play the system.

Should it be published, though? Or rather, why is it published in full? We should know which areas are at the wrong end and they shouldn’t feel any embarrassment about this. But what’s to be gained from listing the least deprived? If a newspaper turns round the findings and calls Stockbridge the most affluent – not The Scotsman, but a rival title did this – then SIMD starts to read like one of those frivolous lifestyle studies or deeply unscientific reports into property trends. Result? More envy, more acquisitiveness, more smugness.

I don’t live in Stockbridge anymore. The family suddenly got bigger and we couldn’t afford the larger house we needed. Did I, for the best part of five decades, enjoy the best of it? I’m not going to claim that for fear of being seen as smug but it was certainly different.

There wasn’t a branch of Farrow