Dr Jekyll and Mr Gray...

Its been a busy time with me. Joyously, and through the heavy half-sunlit clouds, I've been doing some work in brave Edina, ex-Auld Reekie, now polished and gentrified and even more exquisitely middle class. On my wending morning way down towards Stockbridge, I've regularly passed the pub Jekyll and Hyde - named after that bastion of binary Edinburghian dualism - begotten by semi-advocate and indubitable author, Robert Louis Stevenson.

In my waggish way, I could not shake the sensation that I had seen this leering and blue furred phizog of Mr Hyde before... Snaggletoothed, clamp jawed and tetanus gobbed - his terse, unrounded Lothians accent ricocheting off walls as fiercely as a sprung squashball - I suddenly had it! With bizarre synchronicity, and a partisan eye to subliminal manipulation, I realised that the aesthetic model for this boozer's Hyde was none other than the vivid Iain Gray. The likeness, to my mind, is striking. They've got him down pat. Not, of course, that I'd peg Mr Gray for villainy and baseness. And anyway, his coat has none of the glossy healthsome halcyon of this pub's socially hostile, peg-toothed footpad...