Hotel Missoni, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh; 0131 220 6666. Lunch, 12.30pm-3pm, daily. Dinner, Sun-Thu, 6pm-10pm; Fri and Sat, 6pm-11pm

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It was said, although only rarely, and then on special occasions, rather like the taking out of a venerable, valuable, but fragile family tiara, it was said that my Aunt Netta had a friend. It was also said that this friend might well have been apocryphal. A nom de politesse, to spare Netta’s impeccably powdered blushes.

But she’s dead now. And the friend died with her. So let’s just say it was my Aunt Netta, who, by the way, never married and, as far as any of us could tell, had never had a stain on her name. Or her sheets.

Netta devoted her life to looking after her widowed mother and then her widowed sister, my grandmother. You need to imagine a small, bright, neatly turned-out lady with the gamine, nervous look of a siamese cat who wakes one morning to discover she has been transformed into a spinster from Edinburgh. She favoured small cloche hats with feathers, dark glasses with wings, mauve velvet, ivory opera gloves and the sort of shoes that imply passion vanquished by caution. She lived in the New Town, the handsome Georgian grid named for ugly fat Hanoverians.

It was said that, one clear and blustery day, Aunt Netta walked through the public gardens on an errand. Netta was permanently on errands. Her life was a continuous stream of missions, clutching lists cryptically written in a beautiful copperplate hand. These taciturn instructions clung to her like the last dry leaves of autumn. If she stood anywhere for long, which she rarely did, she’d leave behind a little pile of imperatives, things to be done. She’d pick up a curling scrap of paper that insisted on parcel string, ginger marmalade, tea and necessities, and she’d make a small whinnying noise, a mixture of despair and martyrdom, and be off. Necessities was code. She didn’t want to be run over by the butcher’s boy who’d hurtled down Dundas Street far too fast on his bike, and be taken to hospital with the words “toilet paper” about her person. She was never entirely sure whether the mission she was on had been instigated that morning or was from some resurrected list inscribed five years ago. When she died, we found that she had more parcel string than Father Christmas.

So it was said Aunt Netta was hurrying through Heriot Row Gardens. It was early in the war. There were grey ships in the sparkling grey waters of Leith. The Black Watch were in North Africa, and there were shortages. Her messages were barded with question marks. Behind a bush, under a tree, Aunt Netta came across a Gordon Highlander. I always like to imagine him in full fig. The complete McMonty. The gay Gordons, as you know, are an elaborately kilted and bonneted regiment. Though you may have forgotten that they wear the black buttons on their spats in mourning for Sir John Moore of Corunna, for whom, “Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note.” Netta enfiladed the chap, who was, obliviously, ministering to his personal erotic needs. As the kirk would have it, committing the sin of Onan. Or, as they say in the pubs of the Old Town, seeing to himself. Auntie Netta regarded him with a wild surmise. But she didn’t shrink, cavil or shriek. She didn’t faint, drop her list or call for the constabulary. Drawing a deep breath, she said: “Hey, Jock. You shouldn’t be seeing to yourself. Let me finish you off.” And she did. In the ivory opera gloves. Now here’s the thing. When this story was retold, it was never with a salacious wink. The point, the moral, was that it was moral. Blameless. Selfless. Aunt Netta had lent her arm to the war effort. Offering comfort to one of our brave Highland lads.

I’ve burdened you with this story of my family’s erotic altruism because it so completely evokes the Edinburgh that I remember from my childhood. The city that hid behind tartan and shortbread and a ferocious probity that was so often nakedly and overtly sexual. The women of Edinburgh, like my aunt and grandmother, in their hats and gloves and support stockings, ploughing through Jenners like convoys of corvettes, taking tea in the Cally, drinking Drambuie and crème de menthe from minute crystal glasses shaped like thistles, quoting snippets of Burns, being eternally romantic, and just as eternally disappointed, are all gone now. Finally blown away by the wind off the Forth.

I was reminded of Aunt Netta by the two ladies who sat at the table next to me at Cucina in Hotel Missoni. Actually, she would have pursed her lips at my sullying the appellation “lady” on them. They were everything she wasn’t. A pair of lunching, scarlet-gobbed, Botoxed, overweight over-forties, dressed in outfits that might have been appropriate on a 17-year-old Serb in a Mykonos disco. Billowing breast implants and sagging stomachs, spray-tanned, bubble-wrap thighs and french-polished toenails in gladiator sandals, jangling jewellery like kitchen utensils constructed solely out of interlocking logos. Their ferociously yellow blonded hair extensions and flabby faces with Marlboro Light-lined lips gobbing inanities, constantly dipping into gaudy handbags full of BlackBerries and iPhones and antidepressants. They were such a strikingly vulgar pair of brazenly Scottische trollopy jades. There is, in Edinburgh, a culturally cringing plagiarism, a fawning desire to take on English fashion, and in doing so, get it completely ass about tit. These two imagined themselves as up-for-it Wilmslow Wags and had achieved precisely the opposite effect. They stared at each other as comforting mirrors.

Missoni is part of a tentative chain of bijoux hotels designed, I expect, for ladies like this all over the world. The manager told me they were planning on opening a chain. I can’t quite recall where. But it was cities such as Sofia, Gdansk, Veracruz, Antwerp and Riyadh. The restaurant is obviously a fashionable place for the nouveau riche, nouveau suave and nouveau single who want to push lunch around a plate. The kitchen is being overseen by Giorgio Locatelli, who is sensibly keeping his good name as far away as he can. I only discovered it because I recognised the maître d’. The menu is simple, but not in a good way. It’s an undemanding collation of Italian-style favourites aimed squarely at women who are watching their weight run away with them. We had some nice salami. Some good polpo. A decent ravioli, tiramisu. There was a 20% lunch discount. So the bill for two was 50 quid. Which would be okay in Richmond. But is still probably more than most Edinburgh workers would want to pay. But then I can’t think of a figure that they would want to pay.

The most striking thing about this first-floor restaurant is the decoration. Those of you who know Missoni will have an inkling of what its fabrics look like. Those of you who don’t, think test cards from around the world. Think Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely redrawn with a Spirograph. This place is a cacophonous swathe. An eye-jarring, migraine-inducing swatch of jazzy pattern. The fabrics crowd and collide and shriek with a hysterical mime of dazzling Tourette’s. It is the most bilious dining room I’ve eaten in that wasn’t afloat in December. What were they thinking? Where did they think they were?

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