Goodbye To Edinburgh

Yesterday morning was my last in Edinburgh, so I spent some of it in the Elephant House cafe, which I hadn't had a chance to do so previously this year. The cafe gets an extraordinary amount of negative feedback on sites like tripadvisor and foursquare, simply because it trades on the fact that JK Rowling is supposed to have begun writing her Harry Potter books there. This - the negative feedback - is a trifle unfair on the Elephant House, as it's an entirely understandable angle to pull. People who gripe about the cafe celebrating its (admittedly probably quite weak) connection with the world of Harry Potter are like those who'd want to firebomb an old house just because it had a blue plauqe stating that Arthur Conan Doyle once lived there.

Why wouldn't you celebrate the fact that JK Rowling (probably) wrote (some of) the early drafts of Harry Potter there? Frankly, I'm somewhat unconvinced that the story is entirely true as it stands, since popular myth tells us that JKR began writing the books while a young mum, and there doesn't seem to be a great deal of room to get a buggy in there. Although I'll acknowledge that it's probably got a hell of a lot busier in the last ten years.

Of course, that's one of the main reasons people complain on tripadvisor: that it's always so busy, packed with Harry Potter fans (thereby presumably overlooking the resason they were there in the first place). It's probably about as busy as the Black Medicine cafe on the other side of town which is smaller and a lot more awkwardly designed, but has a better system for reducing waiting time and lines at the counter. Plus, it seems slightly cooler than the Elephant House. Well, I once sat next to Will Poulter just before Son Of Rambow came out. I assume that counts for something.

What the Elephant House doesn't have, apart from the sign outside declaring that JK Rowling started writing her books here, is any mention of the boy wizard at all. There are, in respect of the cafe's name, a great deal of ceramic elephants, but Harry Potter appears to be wearing an invisibilty cloak.There's not even any reference to anything vaugely magical - not even a twig repesenting a wand, and you pretty quickly realise that the figure that Must Not Be Named is Warner Bros, doing everything it can to protect its product. That's understandable, but its a shame that its strength is so overeaching that the Elephant House can't even have anything on display like a witches hat, which by and large predate JK Rowling and the films by at least a couple of years.

I'm now wondering if it might not be a little too mean to write a film for Warner Bros that excusively deals with the adventures of a gang of elephants. Who live in a house. See how the cafe and WBs copyright department cope with that ...