“Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl! Keep moving forward! You think we should try to get a decent mail service in the city. I think we should try to send letters anywhere in the world! Because if we fail, I’d rather fail really hugely. All or nothing, Mr. Groat!”
— Moist Von Lipwig, in Terry PRatchett’s Going Postal

I am a dreamer. I’m not afraid of that any more. I am a dreamer, and when I dream, it’s not a miniature cameo, carefully picked out in blues and greens, held close to my chest where nobody else can see it. When I dream, I dream in vast technicolour vistas. I dream in massive triptychs, picked out in heavy reds and golds, detailing the history of the world. And then I try my best to bring other people into those dreams.

In the past, this has been nigh on impossible. Here in Edinburgh, it seems even the very city wants to bring dreams to life. Small dreams develop legs, and large ones spring into the world fully fledged, bellowing and rampaging, like Godzilla on a sugar high. Everything about this city encourages my imagination to run wild, to see the world as I feel it should be, and make that vision a reality.

In the past six months, all I have really written is my blog. This is not because of a lack of imagination or writer’s block, but rather that my imagination has at times been suffering from a sensory overload all of its own. My brain is flashing with ideas, but there’s about twenty of them, and they’re like the dragons in an Escher painting, to the extent that I struggle to find where one ends and the next one begins. “What about…” “And this…” “And then…”

Every time I grab one of them, it slides out of my grasp like an overlarge salmon, and the next one I grab is just as large, just as bright, just as good. I feel like a cat let loose at a fish market. So much glorious food, so where exactly do I start…?

I’m hoping this is more than the honeymoon period. I’d love for this feeling never to die. I want to stay like this, so deeply in love with the city – the city known by the sobriquet City of Literature – that nothing else matters. She makes my brain flow like quicksilver, and she makes me better than I have ever been before. She makes me believe that I can change the world, and above all, by God, she believes in me. Edinburgh. With love like this, no mere person can compare at the moment.

Sometimes, I get all Sam Vimes, strolling around, feeling the city under my feet. She talks to me through my feet, and so I walk and walk some more. Need to get somewhere? Ever tried Jacob’s Ladder? Ever cut across Rutland Square, and under the Standard Life Building? What about the parks? Victoria, Pilrig, St Marks, Inverleith, Lochend, Roseburn, Holyrood? Princes Street Gardens, the Botanic Gardens, Carlton Hill, Duddingston Loch, the Dean Village? Have you found the writers? Sir Walter Scott? Conan Doyle? JK Rowling? Robert Louis Stevenson? Alexander McCall Smith

It’s hard not to get all Sam Vimes, to be honest. She is the pinnacle of inspiration, and all I need to to is learn how to use that spark of creativity – how to grasp each salmon as it appears and hold on to it for long enough to work with it. One day, I will capture this love of the city on paper, bind it into the settings of a novel, and make the city mine, like so many writers have done before. One day, I will make my mark on her.

I am a dreamer, and I’m not afraid to try to make those dreams into something tangible any more.