Let us urge city visitors to go the extra mile

But the oddest thing about the Royal Mile is that it's half-dead. This Death on the Mile occurs in its lower half. If the castle is the Mile's head, and Holyrood Palace its foot, then the Mile is dead from the waist down.

It's a curious phenomenon. From the St Mary's Street-Jeffrey Street intersection up, the joint is bouncing, even at this time of year. Tourists waddle hither and, on occasion, yon. Music bursts forth, buskers yodel, tartan tat shops tout ersatz costumery, flags fly, crowds bustle, and pointing visitors chorus "Oooh!" or even "Ah!". All is alive and cheery.

From the St Mary's Street-Jeffrey Street intersection down, by contrast, it's as if the town were recovering from a plague. And there's no obvious reason for this.

True, there isn't much in the way of amenities, apart from a cemetery and the People's Story Museum. Perhaps, too, it presents a more residential aspect, though there are still shops and a few couthy pubs.Truer still, there's a gap of interest around about the entrance to Moray House College. To the tourist, it'll look as if they've strayed from the action, and so they turn around.

But if they persevered, they'd find the gap brief. Only a few minutes further and the intrepid adventurer comes to that home of reluctant democracy, the Holyrood Parliament and, just across the road, the aforementioned palace. To be fair, there's usually a reasonable crowd of foreign persons at the parliament, looking slightly bewildered and asking themselves: "What is it? There's a large Union flag. Is it the occupying English Army?"

If these attractions don't float their boat, they need only shimmy sideways to the bottom of Holyrood Road to visit Our Dynamic Earth, a permanent exhibition tracing our evolution from the dinosaurs to the Labour Party in Scotland.

However, the rest of Holyrood Road, running parallel to the lower half of the Royal Mile, is pretty dead.

It's odd how this can happen in central locations. It isn't just the Mile itself. Two-thirds of the way up the Mile, there's an intersection by which North Bridge to one side takes you towards the east end of Princes Street while South Bridge, to the other, leads you to the city's southern suburbs.

North Bridge is fine, with an abundance of huge hotels and an open aspect featuring occasional winds that lift your wig off.

However, as soon as this road crosses the Mile and becomes South Bridge, everything turns murky and dowdy. It's all litter and traffic fumes. Even the people suddenly look different, as if there'd been a localised apocalypse.

This doesn't happen at Lothian Road, its south-heading counterpart at the other end of Princes Street. Nor does it happen on the merry if underpopulated Mound, half-way along Princes Street.

Edinburgh is full of such peculiarities. There's Morningside Road with its mad car-door-openers. It's quite a narrow, busy thoroughfare, where shoppers at parked cars, perhaps used to getting their own way with everything, simply open their vehicle doors into the traffic, causing much screeching of brakes.

Another odd area is Broughton Street, which is right bohemian. It has a wholefoods shop. There's a tricky traffic intersection at the top where motorists are often caught betwixt the lights, whereupon the local militant trendies quickly surround them and threaten to jam up their orifices with organic muesli.

Back at the Mile, a campaign has been launched to persuade tourists to visit its nether region. Tourist organisations are branding it "the glorious half mile to Holyrood". The "half" and "mile" are accurate. I'd take out the "glorious" - small pudding, vat of eggs - and substitute "historic" to provide the cheap alliteration that all slogans need and because it cannot be contested, ken?

But I wish the new campaign well. It's time the Royal Mile's twilight zone saw a new dawn.