The sound of old bells as the city sleeps and a faint stir of hope...

EARLY last week I took my two little dogs for a long walk, into and around Edinburgh city centre. It was partly for a change of scene, after nine weeks long in our own small corner.

It was really because in normal times – when under tow by two exuberant Jack Russells – such an expedition would be impossible, between crowded pavements and thunderous traffic.

At first the pooches dragged and dawdled, incessantly pausing to sniff at things. But as we cleared familiar Morningside territory, crested the Boroughmuir and cut across the parched grass of Bruntsfield Links, they grew intense, excited: for dogs love nothing more than new, hitherto unexplored terrain.

The Links looked like they always do during a heatwave – like the aftermath of some terrible disaster, with lightly clad bodies sprawled or dozing all over the place. There were some family groups, but most were very young: disconsolate teens, students at a loose end.

Streets were very quiet and, of course, practically everything was shut, with listless printed apologies for closure in window after window. Little moved on the roads, though I was surprised how often a police car cruised by.

As we passed St Cuthbert’s Kirk, deep in its eerie churchyard off Lothian Road, its bells distinctly chimed the quarterhour. I had never before realised it had a clock, far less bells; but then, in the Edinburgh of normality, how could I have heard them?

Princes Street was as desolate as if everyone had died in the night. So little was moving we could skip from one side of the broad street to the other, the dogs going joyously berserk when we were passed by an almost empty tram.

NOT a one of the great stores, the branches of downmarket chains or the normally clotted fast-food outlets was open. The squirrels had Princes Street Gardens practically to themselves; high on Edinthe burgh Castle (shut, of course) the Union flag hung forlorn against an azure sky.

One already sensed resistance – the entwined couples on the Links, the three lads who pounded along one Princes Street pavement on their bicycles, a Morningside café which had just reopened, reinventing itself, as a sort of takeaway.

But, even as she fought to wake, Edinburgh was for the time being a fallen city, as comprehensively as she fell to Charles Edward Stuart and his men in 1745 – the Prince had to do little more than stroll into it; and, on this occasion, not prostrate before a Highland host but silenced by the terror of a virus, one not a year ago exclusive to bats.

By the Royal Scottish Academy we turned right and climbed The Mound, up to the Royal Mile and the Old Town. More bells – those of St Giles – rang the hour; I had never been aware of them either.

I gazed up the Lawnmarket and down the High Street. A few locals ambled about, but there were no tour buses, no pipers, no street performers, no vendors of hot dogs or ice cream. It was as if the great milling throngs of year-round tourism had never been.

In the Grassmarket, everything was no less closed, though one noted both pathos and humour. In the window of

Petit Paris bistro yet hung the fading poster for a ‘Fondue Party – the last one of the year Monday 23rd March!!!’.

Which never occurred; the restaurant had shut, as eateries everywhere had likewise folded, as we grew daily far too frightened to hop on a bus or eat out, cheek by jowl, in the mingled breath of strangers.

A little notice in a shop selling only fossils made me smile: ‘No toilet roll held on these premises overnight.’ We press on, up Candlemaker Row, past the wee statue of Greyfriars Bobby – I should have let the pooches stop to make obeisance – through Bristo Square and my old university haunts.

Across The Meadows, cutting through Marchmont and past my old school, we went through Morningside and back along the road Charles Edward and his army marched, just below the ridge of Boroughmuir, and so presenting no target for the Castle guns – and, as he in time retreated, so must the virus.

There has been much screeching in recent days – with the benefit of hindsight – that we went into lockdown too late, or are now coming out too soon. Only a fortnight ago, a fuming Dawn Butler MP savaged Boris Johnson for ‘sending people out to get the virus.’

When someone at the weekend pointed out the utter lack of social distancing at London’s huge Black Lives Matter demonstration, she ranted in reply: ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t even go there!’

But in truth, at either end of the emergency, government did not lead: it followed.

We were already retreating from society, stockpiling essentials and shunning buses before Boris Johnson’s stern broadcast. And, over the last weeks we were increasingly coming out of it, delirious in the sunshine, driven to distraction by ever-changing official decrees that made less and less sense.

THERE is, too, a growing sense the virus is on the run. Across Europe, and despite general easing of lockdown, the rates of infection and death have continued to fall.

For the first time in months, Spain went an entire day without a Covid-19 death. Last weekend, a senior Milan doctor told television: ‘In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy… Swabs over the last ten days showed a viral load that was infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago.’

Some doctors dare to hope aloud that the virus may be ‘attenuating’, adapting to less and less lethal form as it passes through person after person.

But this is no counsel for complacency: I will not be boarding any bus in the foreseeable future and, when he came for a garden visit, kept a determined two metres even from my own brother.

We will all have our memories of this bright and sinister spring. The endless, silent queueing. Flinching when a stranger came too close.

The desperate Tuesday morning when the first thing millions of us did was to scramble for our smartphone and see if the Prime Minister was still alive.

The nursey smell of Wright’s Traditional Soap, or the sudden run of burials in scarcely a week, in Morningside Cemetery – a terrifying glimpse of attendants in hazmat suits…

But, too, clean air, vibrant birdsong, unwonted home baking and peerless May sunsets, the sound of old bells as the city lay sleeping.

And, as Albert Camus wrote of the foe in his day: ‘Its energy was flagging, out of exhaustion and exasperation, and it was losing, with its self-command, the ruthless, almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump-card hitherto.

‘Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.’