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I climb gingerly out of the shower room and on to the roof. The sun shines in a blue sky, sending rays of silver skidding over the slates. Wind strums the television aerials. Across the street people drift like goldfish behind their living room glass, unaware that two pairs of eyes are watching them. That's me and Kirk McLenaghan, a King Kong in polished steel-capped boots, clinging to a clump of eight huge mustard pots. What I great job, I think, until I look down. McLenaghan's heavy boots are clamped to a 6in-wide stone ledge. Below the ledge there is a short stretch of steeply sloping roof, then an 80ft drop on to spear-head railings. Hmm, maybe not such a nice job after all.
Chimney sweeps are among the last outsiders. Smokey, muscular, agile, they operate at the interface of good manners and cunning labour, darting about extremities of your house that you dare not think about. Their shadowy nature even eludes state bureaucracy. They are unlicenced, unregulated, un-numbered. The National Association of Chimney Sweeps (Nacs) thinks there are 650 of them, "including part-timers". The Guild of Master Sweeps has "a guesstimate" of 3,000.
Surely the Office of National Statistics will know? But, incredibly, it cannot provide a figure, lumping them in with roadsweepers. The official indifference seems lax - since 1996, poorly swept chimneys have resulted in 138 deaths (carbon monoxide poisoning) and an £85m cost to fire brigades (the expense of extinguishing flames in 171,000 unswept flues) - and slightly disrespectful of serious-minded artisans like 38-year-old McLenaghan. Since the 1930s his Edinburgh-based family company, Auld Reekie, has been checking, cleaning, lining, and repairing domestic chimneys at the core of what is a World Heritage site. Not many roadsweepers, or statisticians, would know how to scrub the inside of a corkscrewing 17th-century stone tube.
At its peak, Auld Reekie employed 14 people. Now, thanks to the 1956 Clean Air Act and changing heating fashions, it is down to three: McLenaghan, his wife Fiona, who runs the office, and Bert Boat, aged 48, who has a Roman nose and a CV that includes the circus and a robot-kidnapping role in the first Star Wars film. They make a striking vision on the doorstep: McLenaghan, tall and fresh-faced, and Boat, smaller than the average, wrapped in navy cotton, ropes and bristles and bearing brass-tipped rods, might easily be mistaken for an ethnic dance troupe.
Two is actually the minimum number for an Edinburgh sweeping team. Because of the height of the city's medieval tenements which sometimes stretched 14-storeys tall, its "sooty-men" developed a technique whereby a "roper" threads his brush down to the waiting "bottomer" using a weighted cord. The 18th-century charge for this service was four old pennies. To hire McLenaghan (roper) and Boat (bottomer) today costs from £50 (seven old pennies), which is a bargain if it prevents your £750,000 townhouse burning to the ground.
"People look at the top and bottom, of the chimney and see a 9in opening," muses McLenaghan as his Toyota van shudders over the cobbles, "but they don't know what's in the middle." Have they ever found anything interesting? "A crab," says Boat, "18in wide."
Our first call is at the three-storey home of an ebullient, goateed antiques dealer. "The biggest problem often isn't the work, but the customers' homes," McLenaghan remarks en route. I see what he means. The living room is a minefield of fragile porcelain, glass, walnut, and upholstery, waiting to snag a sooty elbow "This place is full of pitfalls designed to confuse men and alarm their maker," chortles the dealer while trying, unsuccessfully, to spread a sheet over a rare collection of Sir Walter Scotts. While Boat seals off the fireplace, McLenaghan begins preparing his yo-yo act on the alarming ledge.
"Hee-hee-hee," he bellows into one pot.
"Hee-hee-hee," a voice responds faintly from another. Clearly it would be a calamity to thrust a brush down the wrong chimney. After a few more hees the correct flue is identified. McLenaghan cautiously lowers his 5lb scouring pad into the darkness. He estimates that it takes 10 years to become a first-class roper: there is a sooty lore of line splicing, brush customising, weather gauging, draught sensing and stone restoring to be mastered. And if the bristles' speed is too precipitate, soot will rush into the vacuum behind them, blow out Boat's calico bandage and cover the householder's precious possessions in a fine layer of filth. It has happened before, but this time everything goes to plan.
"Lay the fire, shutters shut, pour a dram, and goodnight Vienna," exults the dealer. There is the same excitement when McLenaghan and Boat pull up at the next (somewhat smaller) address. "There's something about a fire that appeals to the boy scout in people," declares Richard, a 39-year-old freelance computer programmer, as Boat rummages under his mantelpiece. Two further customers are seeking advice on re-opening chimneys. Clearly there is something in the zeitgeist. Aesthetics and fuel costs may come into it (the price of coal has gone up less than gas or oil) but the Nacs president Martin Glynn thinks he has detected a deeper, geopolitical impulse. "The trend started in summer when Russia invaded Georgia and the papers were full of stories about how the Russians could turn the gas tap off," he thinks.
We drive for a few minutes then park on a busy shopping street. Traffic wardens can be indulgent where the Auld Reekie van is concerned. In a snack bar, Boat orders two egg and sausage sandwiches, a Coke, a Mars bar, a Toffee Crisp and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. "I need my energy," he explains, unapologetically. Henry "Hen" Pearce, probably the best-known British sweep, also took his food seriously: the undisputed boxing champion of 1805 consumed raw eggs and raw bees "to make him more savage", according to historian Bettina Cullingford.
I ask McLenaghan to tell me about the professional dangers he faces. "The risk part is there, but we do enjoy it," he says. "If I had to do it all from the inside, fine, but it can be a bit boring." The biggest threats, he says, are roofs that are wet, "green" or frosty. A few years ago a sweep at Oxgangs, in south-west Edinburgh, died in a fall. Another sweep was killed when his metal ladder touched an electric cable. Impatience is a big enemy. McLenaghan's grandfather, also a sweep, had to sack a worker nicknamed The Monkey because he leapt from gable to gable. McLenaghan's worst accident was when, pushing to get a job done, he had rested the base of his ladder in a plastic gutter. "It buckled and spat the ladder out and I slid down 15ft at a great speed."
It was, of course, worse in the old days. Our last call is to a flat where Sally, a legal editor, wants advice on installing a stove. Two hundred yards from her front door is the Assay Office of Scotland, formerly a Welsh chapel, where on 3 June 1817, a "climbing boy" called John Fraser became trapped in a chimney. After hours of struggle his infuriated master wrapped a rope round Fraser's legs and wrenched so hard the boy's neck broke.
I squeeze with McLenaghan up through a narrow corridor skylight. To the north Fife and the Lomond hills quiver on the blue blade of the river Forth. Auld Reekie tends to 1,300 central Edinburgh chimneys; they cling to the evening light like the fingers of drowning men. Crouching gingerly, I ask McLenaghan if a life spent trawling the rim of civilisation has, perhaps, made him more contemplative; after all, only sweeps and roofers can daily measure human beings against the vast scale of their surroundings.
He kneads his gloves thoughtfully. "Certainly there are times when you don't want to go down. Look at that beautiful spire over there," he says, pointing at an elegant sandstone pencil two streets away. "That's Bellevue church." He raises his eyes. "Up here you can sit and watch the clouds changing over the river. And when it starts to get dark, and the lights come on, everything changes again." With his left hand he gestures at the rows of white-shirted figures dimly visible through the windows of the office building across the street. "Everybody is sat away in their offices with their computer screens, looking at the credit crunch. Most of them," he reflects ruefully, "don't know what a chimney sweep is."
Curriculum vitae
Pay: Around £20,000, once wages, VAT and overheads have been deducted.
Hours: 7am to 7pm, often six days a week.
Work-life balance: "I have no life outside work just now; I used to do a lot of marathons but that's all over."
High point: "The job - it's brilliant. It's what I do; I love it."
Low point: "The damp, and houses with white carpets."
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