I had a dream....

Some years ago I bought my first flat (apartment) in Edinburgh. It was in a run down area full of first time buyers living side by side with druggies and alcoholics. There were 'the originals' living there too; the old couples who had moved in years earlier to start up home and raise their families and who had stayed, now living out their retirement in the same home they had started out life together in.

My flat was small but bright and airy and looked out onto the local play park where children screamed and cried on summer nights and drinkers gathered in the darkening hours to laugh and argue and swear, leaving their beer cans for the children to trip over the next day.  Once behind my front door I was safe and happy. I cooked and baked and listened to music and over the years I decorated that small space as I liked, making it a pretty and comfortable home. But I yearned for something more..........

Edinburgh is a beautiful city. It has some of the world's best architecture, it has beautiful parks, wonderful museums and great restaurants and cafes. It has the old and the new, sitting side by side; one town gracious and elegant, the other older, mysterious, quaint. Both can charm its visitors and residents alike. My little flat in the run down side of town didn't feel like this Edinburgh even if it was just a short bus ride away. And so I had a dream, that one day I would live in the pretty side of town, the Edinburgh that the tourists knew and that other Edinburgh residents took for granted.

And when the time came, when love had arrived, we went looking for our new home together. We knew what we wanted, and after some months of hunting, we found it. It was an early Victorian flat, hidden behind the main street, with only a few steps from the front door to the Water of Leith. Every window looked out to broad leaf trees, through wobbly old glass in the original casement windows. There was a big bay window in the sittingroom and the original fireplace for cosy fires in winter.

The grounds surrounding the flat were beautiful. Grassy lawns sheltered by trees, with flower beds full of cottage garden blooms - fox gloves, roses, and petunias and daisies. There was cow parsley and ivy growing in the shady edges beside the hedges.

It was perfect and we bought it. And so the dream began.