Many thanks to reader Mark Saunders, who has sent us this upbeat vision of future developments.
It was conceived, perhaps, through topaz-coloured spectacles.
*****
Call for Artists
Come all ye artists!
The Golden Turd needs you!
you, who can glorify the work
on this blue January day
who can scale the concrete towers
more impregnable than the Castle
and the cranes towering taller still
like ancient siege equipment.
Describe how the well-clad workers
– Polish, Bosnian, Romanian –
descend from the cold heights
for black pudding and tattie scone,
how, as the Zuni cafe of San Francisco states:
immigrants make the country great.
Describe, artist, how this food for fuel
is served by Will in pristine chef whites
and his Grassmarket Project crew.
We need an artist who can express the soul
of the build, give voice to blank walls,
a voice that sings of a new icon, warmer and softer
than the glacial, sharp-edged London Shard,
newer than the fusty old New Town
which sits like a row of disapproving aunts.
We need a writer who can create fictions,
sending a detective to pace the spiral corridors
in sad, worn-out shoes,
or a painter of the constructivist mode
observing each nut and bolt, pin and rod
with the eye of an engineer.
Or a dancer who dances the form
as body marries architecture.
Or give it the brash Bollywood treatment,
a steamy tale of forbidden love
set against the shimmering gold.
Most importantly,
we need an artist who can
envision the future:
a city criss-crossed by electric bullet trains
palm trees lining Princes St,
the ruins of the New Town
cleared away for owl-filled park land.
The Castle and Hollyrood Palace turned hostel
to house climate change refugees.
The Turd, white with age, now
dubbed the Taj Mahal of the north,
its proud reflection in a lake
where once John Lewis stood.