SUNDAY JOINT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN FOR THE MATRONS OF MORNINGSIDE

You could hear the hiss of intaken breath the length of Morningside Drive.
Behind the lace curtains of Murrayfield the lips were pursed.

At James Gillespie's High School, where Miss Jean Brodie taught the "creme
de la creme", they turned their faces to the wall. For sheer vulgarity,
Edinburgh had never heard the like of it. A plan has been proposed to
introduce cannabis cafes to this, the most respectable city in Britain,
thus transforming it into the Amsterdam of the North, a place where sex and
drugs and possibly even rock 'n' roll would take the place of a brisk walk
up Arthur's Seat on a Sunday morning.

The idea is that, with the easing of legal constraints on smoking pot,
Edinburgh would be well-placed to attract the fun-loving youth of Europe.

To judge from early reactions, the idea has some way to go. "Seedy",
"disreputable", "undignified" were some of the responses that greeted the
suggestion, which came from Peter Irvine, an impresario whose innovations
have included rock concerts in Edinburgh Castle, and a Hogmanay Festival on
Princes Street. He denied wanting to turn Edinburgh into a "magnet for
dopers" but said that by introducing a few cafes where cannabis could be
smoked, the city would send out a message to the world that it was
"enlightened" and "different", just as Amsterdam has acquired a reputation
as the free-thinking capital of Europe.

His proposal was immediately condemned. "Amsterdam," pronounced a Tory
councillor, "is sleazy and vile, so why are we trying to emulate it?" You
could see where she was coming from. This after all, is the city where John
Knox condemned women as a frivolous sex, and gave warning that too much
dancing would incur the "displeasure of God's people". It is where they
signed the Solemn League and Covenant, and a woman hurled a stool at the
pulpit when Archbishop Laud forbade the Presbyterian order of service.

On the other hand, the introduction of cannabis is likely to happen anyway,
for Edinburgh is a city of delightful hypocrisy. Despite its reputation for
apparently inalienable propriety, it loves to sin. Sex thrives in its
saunas and massage parlours, and street prostitution has been given
protection in a "toleration zone" down by the docks, in an area discreetly
protected by CCTV cameras.

The city has won a reputation as the gay capital of Scotland, and has an
array of late-night clubs catering for a variety of bizarre tastes.

This is all very much in the tradition of Mrs Dora Noyce's well-patronised
brothel in Danube Street, in the heart of the Georgian New Town, which,
within recent memory, catered for the requirements of distinguished
visitors, and is said to have done brisk trade during the annual meetings
of the Church of Scotland General Assembly. A hundred years earlier, the
city invented the 19th-century version of lap-dancing. The Beggar's Benison
was a club in Fife, but with branches in the city, where they celebrated
Jacobite politics and free sex. Women were paid to be "posing girls", while
their patrons proposed bawdy toasts and drank from phallus-shaped glasses.

Edinburgh, according to Allan Massie, author of an excellent book on the
city's history, has long been "held in the grip of a dual identity -
respectable and God-fearing on the one hand, rebellious and scornful in its
debauchery on the other". Its double-life entranced Robert Louis Stevenson
who based Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on the scandal of Deacon Brodie, town
councillor and cabinet-maker by day, burglar by night, who was finally
caught and hanged on a gibbet of his own construction. In the early 1990s
it played host to an archetypal scandal, known as the "Magic Circle"
affair, which provoked a judicial inquiry into a louche subculture of
dubious lawyers, unscrupulous detectives and assorted rent boys. Nothing of
real substance emerged, but the whiff of sulphur lingered long afterwards.

For all its prim reputation, it has always been quietly permissive, and it
was, therefore, not surprising to hear, last week, a minister of the
straitlaced Free Church displaying remarkable sang-froid at the prospect of
Edinburgh becoming a pot-head city. "Historically it has always been
progressive," said Professor John McLeod, Principal of the Free Church
College. "It prides itself on being culturally and intellectually avant-garde."

Later this year the radical publisher Kevin Williamson, who is credited
with discovering Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame, plans to take the
minister at his word and open the first cannabis cafe in the city. If past
experience is anything to go by, the matrons of Morningside will utter a
brisk tut-tut, then pop in for an afternoon spliff.