A window in New Town, Edinburgh. This is one of my favourite places in the world, and when I am unaccountably wealthy, I shall buy a place there. The stone is actually the same colour as the sandstone of Bath, but the accumulated grime of a hundred years of coal fires has turned the whole area grey. Edinburgh looks great whatever the weather.

This picture was chosen to be on the front cover of the novel The Sunday Philosophy Club by the top-selling author Alexander McCall Smith. In Britain, the cover is different, but this is what you will see if you buy the USA, Canadian, and Dutch editions, plus some large print and audio tape editions. It seems that the way it happened was this: at a meeting, they decided that a photograph of a window in Edinburgh would be right for the cover. Someone then typed "Edinburgh" and "window" into Google, and they got this page. So, I was lucky there. Had I called this same photograph "Shattered sunshine in a grim stone sea", then they would never have found this shot, and I would be a bit poorer.