Always having been wary of change, I find it infinitely reassuring that some things, like some people, never do.
On our last visit to Edinburgh we popped into Unicorn Antiques on Dundas Street, just around the corner from my first flat in the city (a basement in Cumberland Street - possibly the smallest and quirkiest flat in town - which I bought in 1987 for £7000). Unicorn has been going since 1967, and Nancy Duncan still sits at the same window - behind, I wouldn't be surprised, the same desk - as when I first popped in thirty-five years ago.
Unicorn is the proverbial Alladin's cave, and the only place to go, if you want to know, for good quality, bone-handled antique cutlery at the right price. Smaller antiques and bric-a-brac fill the single room off the street to bursting, and one of Edinburgh's best-kept secrets can be found in the sub-basement below: an extravagantly eclectic range of larger pieces in a series of interconnected rooms which stretch way back beneath the Georgian tenement.
Just one of Edinburgh's many jewels.
