RAIN drizzles on the grey, cold stone of aloof residential buildings on regimented streets.

These cobbled streets, as broad as rivers, circumnavigate locked, communally restricted gardens into which hoi polloi can only stare.

Welcome to Edinburgh's New Town. It's Scotland's most expensive district, with nine properties selling for between £1 million and £1.8m so far this year. All that for a posh tenement. Whisper it if you will, but I cannot abide the place. Never liked it.

Having, in previous chronicles, established my plebeian credentials by noting various hideous estates (sometimes called the worst in Europe) where once I scraped an existence, I should own that I've also lived on the New Town's fringes.

It was no big deal. My first teenage bedsit was on the eastern edge, and I never thought anything of it, nor of the deeper New Town proper. A skint friend with drug issues lived in nearby Scotland Street, and I worked as a labourer in the aforementioned gardens where, in autumn, I hauled a foliage-filled horse-cart through the cobbled streets.

If that sounds feudal, be further amazed that my employer was Lord Somebody's Feuars. Posh ladies walking poodles would say "Morning, McNeil!", unaware that, behind their backs, my workmate and I were making lewd movements at them with our hips.

The truth is that, if there were any class aspect at all, it was that we thought ourselves superior to such folk. It was the mid-seventies, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was imminent.

Much later, I rented briefly a flat on the Stockbridge side of the New Town border. Tourist buses used to stop outside, with the guide saying: "And this is where the Scottish person lives." The overwhelming accent in these environs is, shall we say on grounds of political correctness, posh.

I've always enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's ruse of setting a comedy about Scottish people in a New Town street which, in reality today, now has only one Scottish person in it. That one, oddly enough, is Irvine Welsh, and he's only an occasional visitor from Chicago, if indeed he hasn't sold up altogether.

Even odder is the fact that the People's Irvine once had a spat with the amiable McCall Smith, who said his sort were miserabilists. How could the literature of a sun-blessed country with full control over problems like poverty be miserable? It's a right mystery, ken?

Technically, the New Town at its opposite border from Stockbridge takes in Princes Street, which is priceless, considering that famous thoroughfare's tartan tat shops and occasional concrete monstrosities. The neo-barbaric St James Centre at its eastern end is the jewel in the see-you-Jimmy hat.

The northern end's street names are instructive: George, Frederick, Queen, Charlotte, Hanover. Deeper in, you come to Cumberland, for God's sake. Even as you leave the New Town to the east, across the top of Leith Walk to the much later, proletarian area where I grew up, the names proclaim fealty: Brunswick, Albert, Windsor, Regent.

Indeed, mind your stomach contents as we note that James Craig's original street layout of the New Town, while later revised, was based on the Union flag. The civic driving force behind the New Town was Perthshire-born George Drummond, six times Lord Provost of Edinburgh.

As an 18-year-old accountant, Drummond worked on the financial details of the Treaty of Union. Later, he fought against the Jacobites at Sheriffmuir and tried raising an army to defend Edinburgh against Prince Charlie. It fled.

Part of the New Town's rationale was to stop wealthy citizens fleeing to London from the crowded Old Town. Thus the wealthy: forever threatening to flee.

If you flee round the back of relatively posh Edinburgh tenements in, say, Bruntsfield or Marchmont, you find they're mostly rough stone that hardly looks different from flats in Gorgie or Leith.

Basically, you're paying more for a bit of dressed stone at the front. Parts of the New Town are similar: perfumed face and dirty behind. Still, if you won't miss upwards of a million pounds, be my guest. And yes, madam, I am making lewd movements behind your back.