August 2025

“It’s like ice cream, Mr Flynn,” Bertie continued. “When you have ice cream, you need to eat it straight away, otherwise it melts. If there are people who haven’t got any, you should share it, if you can.” When despair for the world grows, Bertie’s theory of ice cream reminds us that it’s the simple pleasures in life that we should hold onto. Bertie’s Theory of Ice Cream is the latest instalment in the world’s longest-running serial novel, 44 Scotland Street, and is officially published on 7th August.

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We all get different things out of looking up at ceilings. For Angus Lordie, owner of the dog known as Cyril and an accomplished portrait painter, a ceiling was a blank canvas on which the mind could paint whatever it wished. Ceilings were finished with plaster, of course – at least, ceilings in Georgian buildings in that part of Edinburgh were – but he thought it might just as well be gesso: that thick white paste of chalk and binding agent that artists slapped on a canvas before applying paint.

Angus had learned to make traditional gesso at art college, and still used those materials rather than acrylics. Acrylics were convenient, but they lacked the feel of the old ingredients, and, importantly, they did not smell. Angus liked things to smell, believing that if something smelled, it was in some deep sense more natural than something that did not. So, for his own gesso, he used rabbit-skin glue mixed with warm water and old-fashioned chalk – a combination with a very characteristic pungent smell. Then, ideally with early Italian music playing in the background, he would roll up his sleeves and apply the resulting paste to the naked canvas. Also audible in the background at such times would be the complaining voice of Domenica – “Angus, that disgusting smell! Is it really necessary?”

Looking up now at the broad white expanse of his ceiling on Scotland Street, he imagined how Poussin might have filled it from cornice to cornice. Nicolas Poussin liked sky, with stray cumulus, a horizon of hills as often as not, and a foreground of unhurried figures. There was more than enough sky in Scotland to satisfy Poussin. He would have approved, too, of Drummond Place, of the railings and the tall trees that swayed in the wind that blew in from the Forth or the Pentland Hills. He would have understood the Scottish weather, with its changes and challenges. He would have felt at home with the classicism of Edinburgh.

On the other side of the kitchen table, Domenica Macdonald, anthropologist and wry observer of life, who had married Angus some years previously, rescuing him from paint-spattered bachelordom, saw that he was staring at the ceiling and asked him what he had been thinking about. You do not have to know what your spouse is thinking all the time – and sometimes it is better not to – but Domenica occasionally liked to enquire.

“I was thinking of how Poussin would have painted our ceiling,” he replied. And then, without revealing any further thoughts, he said, “And you?”

“Friends,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about how long it is since we had anybody in for dinner. Or lunch, for that matter. Or coffee . . .”

Angus frowned. “Really? Didn’t we have . . .” He faltered. He thought there had been somebody, and it was not all that long ago, but now the recollection escaped him. Had it been Matthew and Elspeth? Or that woman from Melrose who had bought one of his paintings, and who turned out, as often happens in Scotland, to be a cousin of his second cousin’s husband?

Domenica remembered these things. “I can tell you exactly,” she said. “It’s five months since I cooked dinner for anybody apart from us. I bought a leg of lamb and I used five cloves of garlic. I remember it very clearly. There was a moment of indecision before I chopped the third clove, but then I decided to throw caution to the winds.”

“And yet we have those evenings when we invite everybody,” said Angus. “The regular crowd, including Stuart downstairs . . . Speaking of whom, I saw wee Bertie the other day, and that little friend of his—”

“Ranald Braveheart Macpherson,” prompted Domenica.

Angus smiled. “Yes, that’s him.” He returned to the question of dinner parties. “Yes, we have those suppers for friends, but not nearly often enough.”

Domenica looked thoughtful. “I think social habits have changed. People aren’t going out so much to other people’s houses – at least, not in the formal way they used to. The dinner party’s dead, I think.”

Angus considered this. It was a resounding statement: the dinner party’s dead. It was rather like announcing the end of the Age of Baroque or the Mesolithic period. Yet, it was probably true, he thought. There had been a time when on most Fridays or Saturdays there would have been an invitation to go to dinner at somebody’s house. The evening would follow a set pattern – drinks beforehand, and then the setpiece: a three-course meal, with conversation running along well-worn tracks. He smiled at the recollection.

“Something amusing?” asked Domenica.

“I’m thinking of the topics that were discussed at Edinburgh dinner parties,” he said, adding, “in the days when people still had them.”

She waited.

“Firstly,” he said, “those who were not there. They would always be discussed – sometimes with a distinct lack of charity.”

Domenica grinned. “This city has always been a bit—”

“Brittle?” Angus offered. He remembered what the poet Ruthven Todd had said in one of his poems about his native Edinburgh. It was, he said, a city where “dry minds grew crusts of hate, like rocks grow lichen”. Ouch. Did Todd really think that? And was it true? Perhaps, he decided – at least, in the days when the city was so stratified. But not now, even if Edinburgh was still a bit . . . how might one put it? Disapproving? Yes, that was it, and the times when disapproval might be shown were at these dinner parties when absent friends – or absent rivals, perhaps, were being discussed.

But there were other topics for the dinner table. House prices. Schools. Books that everybody was reading, or at least thinking of reading. He remembered an occasion when an author who had been read by nobody at the table had nevertheless been roundly dispatched by all present. It took a certain style to do that – and Edinburgh had it.

What had happened? Was Domenica right in saying that the Edinburgh dinner party was no more – or was it simply that he and Domenica were not being invited to such dinner parties as were taking place? That, he thought, was a distinct possibility. It was even quite likely that there were still plenty of dinner parties being held – but it was other people who were gathering round the tables. They could even be happening right there – in the flats on their common stair; right there at 44 Scotland Street, and they knew nothing about it.

He thought of the flats in question. There was Stuart downstairs – formerly Stuart of Stuart and Irene, but now Stuart and his mother, Nicola, and of course, Bertie and his little brother, Ulysses. Did Nicola act the hostess and invite friends to dinner while Ulysses wailed in the background? He was so unlike Bertie, that child. And he was so malodorous. It was wrong, Angus knew, to blame a child for that, but Ulysses really was so . . . Angus put the matter out of his head. He was wondering now whether he and Domenica had a sufficient number of friends. But what was the right number when it came to friends?

“Have you heard of the Dunbar number?” he said, rather suddenly.

“What?” Domenica asked. There were so many numbers to be remembered nowadays – was this Dunbar number yet another one?

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Bertie’s Theory of Ice Cream is available from 7th August 2025 from Polygon.