Best of Edinburgh

'Tis the season for heavily subjective lists...

Best view:
“You take the high road and I'll take the low road…”

You can keep your Arthur's Seats and Carlton Hills, give me a glance down Dublin Street towards the Forth. [It doesn't photograph so well, especially on a rainy day in December, but humour me.]

I still recommend every visitor climbs Arthur's Seat and Carlton Hill, but I always feel underwhelmed by views from on high.

Stand on the corner of Dublin and Queen Streets and you're not even at the top of the slope (that would be further up towards Princes Street). But the view has it all, Georgian architecture giving way to greenery (the Botanical Gardens lie somewhere within those trees) and the normally-blue streak of the Forth and the evergreen streak of the Kingdom of Fife. The view is best appreciated after first looking down Howe Street towards St. Stephen's Church and a hidden Stockbridge (best place for quality bread, cheese and seafood) - - something about the withheld promise of the Forth being delayed until Dublin Street. Even though I walked down Queen Street ten times a week for nine months this year, I never tired of this fleeting view.

Best place to go on your lunch break:

Having just bagged it, I'm recommending Carlton Hill here. Two of my three jobs were within range so that I could climb Carlton Hill and have the breeze blow work from my brain for half an hour. It helped remind me that I was still a tourist, that I still had things to explore and discover. I imagine it would reenergise a lifelong resident in a similar way.

Best place to read a book:

Despite the above, I spent most of my lunchtimes reading a book in the breakroom at work. As a place to read a book, the breakroom (three floors below street level) cannot compare to sitting on the grassy slope of the Princes Gardens in the sun. The thing is, you probably only have three chances a year to do this [hence no photo this time], so have a book at the ready!

Best month:

It’s a toss up between August and December.

So what if Summer 2008 came and went on a Thursday? August is still the most interesting time to be in Edinburgh. Comedy, theatre, music, busking, street parades, and more free events than one could possibly attend, you've no excuse to be bored.

In December, on the other hand, no one expects the weather to be nice, so there's no tinge of disappointment, unless you're hoping for a decent snowfall. Princes Street and the Gardens are again the place to be with the German Market, ice skating rink, and fairground rides. And then, of course, there's Hogmannay on the 31st: hand's down the best New Years I've ever had.

Best place to go every month

The Scottish Poetry Library, of course. On my first visit, I felt a bit of an imposter. I was the only person there apart from the librarian, and she didn't seem keen to acknowledge my presence. The floor creaked terribly. I was looking for an anthology of modern Scottish poetry, which I found, but also left with five volumes of New Zealand poetry. Again, I felt an imposter: a NZer borrowing NZ books from the SCOTTISH poetry library, but I learnt not to worry (it always seemed to be a different librarian issuing my books). A more correct emphasis would be: the Scottish POETRY Library.

At the beginning of 2008 didn't see the need for a library dedicated to poetry... now I write the stuff with my serious writing face on. Be warned: the same could happen to you!

Favourite Building

Another tie.

West Register Building, Charlotte Square

St Mary’s Church, Palmerston Place

This church features in Novel B, despite the story being exclusively set in New Zealand. I'm not really a churchy person, but I suspect my affection for St. Mary's began when I noticed that at dusk it looks like Gotham City's take on the Disney Castle:

As I walked around town today, the weather was miserable and so was I for the most part. Why can I not find risoni in any supermarket all of a sudden? Why do people say they'll buy something off you but never arrive to pick it up? Why does my iPod run out of battery just as I leave the house? Edinburgh isn't so great a city that it makes bad moods impossible - - heck, it's probably caused a few - - but, if you walk around long enough, you'll find some sort of rainbow.

Sorry, that was a bit cheesy. But I'm leaving in two days. I can barely see the keyboard for the nostalgic mist that has set in.

All Tore Up Tonight

Sort-of expat NZer Kapka Kassabova in the Sunday Times (via Bookman Beattie):

Rivulets of urine crisscross the pavements as you slalom between puddles of fresh vomit, discarded takeaway cartons smeared with ketchup, and the occasional survivor swooning in an alcoholic daze in some corner, watering the nearest pot plant... On a Saturday morning, it’s normal to walk past the Calabrian restaurant and find its spotless window smashed. And the boutique next door, and the cafe next door to that. On a Sunday morning, it’s normal to find all the cars parked in my street with their side mirrors smashed. It’s normal to find the glass entrance to my building smashed, to have it fixed, and then smashed again. And so it goes in our pleasant neighbourhood.

That neighbourhood? Pricey Broughton in central Edinburgh's East End.

When I lived on Queensferry Street in the West End, my experience was almost identical. It's no fun to find the entrance to your building covered in chip-shop & alcopop vomit on a Saturday morning. And to find it still there when you get back in the afternoon. Or, in the still of night (you really notice it once the buses stop) to be woken by the same swear word over and over, louder and louder, until you think the guy's head must explode, but then he remembers another swear word and starts again.

In her piece, Kapka Kassabova goes on to claim she feels safer in Bulgaria than in Britain. I haven't been to Bulgaria, so I can't really comment, but I don't think it's really an issue of safety. I've never felt unsafe in Edinburgh. Just as you need to be doing something pretty wrong to end up being gunned down by a mutri, you normally have to make a succession of mistakes to end up on the wrong end of a drunken Brit's weekend lash-out.

The results of alcohol are annoying, and unsavoury, but I'd stop short of scary.

When I moved further out of the city (admittedly, Polwarth is still not that far) it bought home how localised the loutish behaviour is, and how precious a little piece and quiet. The unsightly remains of a night on the turps have, however, been replaced by footpaths covered in dog poo [photo omitted]. Nowhere's perfect, eh?

Reading Kapka's moan (however well argued, it's hard to deny that's what it is), what I now want to know is why she choses a) to live in the UK and b) in Edinburgh? This isn't the sort of snide rhetorical question many of the commenters to her piece employed (Why don't you go back to Bulgaria, then? etc), but genuine interest. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason why Edinburgh appeals to a multi-lingual, multi-national, multi-talented person is closely related to why Scots are so tolerant of drunken misbehaviour. After all, the unfettered celebrations of Hogmanay would be impossible somewhere less permissive, and that's exactly why it works, if only for one night of the year.

Sometimes the things we hate are holding the things we love together.

And the Festival Leaves Town

[For the soundtrack to this post, open this in another tab...]

Edinburgh International Book Festival Wrap-Up

Now that I have attended literary festivals in Wellington, Brisbane, Melbourne and Edinburgh, I know there’s several ways an hour long session with a writer can go. There’s the session where the author reads for too long and leaves very little time for discussion. There’s the session dominated by the chair who has too much or too little knowledge of the author. There’s the session where everything goes well until the audience is asked for questions and there are none. There’s the session where everything goes well until the audience is asked for questions and there is an endless supply of terrible ones…

The motivation to attend most writers’ sessions is to hear the voice behind the voice on the page, and the thoughts behind the book. This was the case with me and Andrey Kurkov (see below). Often, the least interesting part of a session is when the author is asked to read from their latest work (as per Nam Le). You’ve either read it already (if you’re paying £9, you better bloody like their stuff), or it’s so hard to grasp what is going on out of context, or the author isn’t a great reader of their own work. But I’m talking about prose sessions here. The rules don’t apply to poetry…

Carol Ann Duffy
Saturday 23 August, 8pm

Carol Ann Duffy took the stage after a brief intro from the chair and proceeded to read poems for the rest of the hour. She began with two excerpts from 'The Laughter of Stafford Girl's High', and ended with the final section. In between she read poems from her collections The World’s Wife and Rapture. I haven’t read the latter, but I had experienced all the other poems on the page before. Unlike prose, where hearing is a poor cousin of reading, most poems that come to life when read aloud, when performed. This is not true of all poems (some are built for the page, some are unreadable), and not all poets are performers, but Carol Ann Duffy did a good job on Saturday of choosing her set list (continuity, variation, humour) and performing it in such a way that the audience never felt like it was missing a trick.

Nam Le
Sunday 24 August, 10am

There’s always an exception to the rule. In this case the rule is: A short story collection (especially a début collection) can’t make waves. Of course it helps if you’ve done a Tour of Duty at the Iowa Workshop and held fellowships on both sides of the Atlantic. The cynical among us might add the fact that Nam was born in Vietnam (and grew up in Australia), but his collection, The Boat, shoots down expectations that it will play up his exoticism (his word) from the very first story.

The session was actually held as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, beamed into the RBS Main Theatre in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square via Satellite link-up. The audience in Edinburgh got the chance to ask two questions, just to prove this was live and interactive, though the questions were so astute, I almost wonder if these audience members were plants by the festival, or Edinburgh City of Literature, to ensure they weren’t embarrassed in front of the newest City of Literature.

Nam Le spoke candidly and eloquently about how his stories and ultimately his collection came together. A glance at the Q&A section of his website reveals he’s been saying the similar things since March, which isn’t anything against the man, just the world in which writers are forced operate (should they desire to sell many books or at least get reviewed by the NY Times…).

I’ve already quoted one of his analogies on this blog and find myself chewing over the thoughts provoked by this session much more than any other I attended over the festival. Not bad for a freebie.

Andrey Kurkov
Sunday 24 August, 6:45pm

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian of Russian extraction who writes in Russian, though he is also fluent in Ukrainian, and Japanese (in which he trained as a translator; this almost led to him joining the KGB), and English (Sunday’s reading and Q&A was all in English) and perhaps several other languages. His most well known book is Death and the Penguin.

His session, however, fell into the ‘annoying chair who hijacks the hour’ category. When the floor was opened up to questions, I thought, “At last, the books might get discussed!”, only to discover that other audience members were just as interested in what the future holds for politics in the Ukraine—and screw any insights into the books of Andrey Kurkov!

When one audience member expressed his dismay at Kurkov’s views, delivered with his typical black humour, about Ukranian politicians (they’re nice people, but they love money *shrug*), and how, being so close to Poland, this would be disastrous for the EU, and, “Please reassure me it’s not so bleak,” I lost faith in humanity. I raised my hand to ask the next question, but someone else was chosen. My head fell into my hands, but to my surprise, the woman with the microphone asked my question. In fact, being a professional translator, she was better qualified to ask about how involved Andrey Kurkov is in the translation process (Answer: he’s has a new translator for English, who has never contacted him, which is not uncommon across the 20+ languages his work has been translated into; however some, like the Japanese translator who spent three days in Kiev visiting all the sites in Death and the Penguin, do go beyond the call of duty)…

So, the session was not a complete wash, but whenever you write this on the back of your ticket, you know something dire has happened:

When I spend a lot of time by myself, or in the exclusive company of people I have known for a long time, I find my thoughts (and writing) are quite positive w.r.t. human beings on an individual scale. But when I am surrounded by strangers I find I am a total misanthrope.

This was, thankfully, not my final brush with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. On Monday, the last day of the festival and a bank holiday (woo-hoo), Marisa and I attended Ron Butlin’s free reading. He read a very short story and two short poems (one of which I’d previously read here). I would like to thank Ron Butlin, and all the other Ten at Ten authors (and whoever at the Festival came up with this new feature) for restoring my faith in book festivals and humankind. Honestly, sometimes you can’t beat a good reading.

So, my thoughts about the world’s biggest book festival really all boil down to this:

I would have liked to have seen more, but several factors limited the number of sessions I attended:

* the cost (upwards of £9 per hour long session; much more if you wanted to attend a workshop)

* the timing i) (a lot of events on during work hours)

* the timing ii) (a lot of other fringe/international festival events competing for my time and money)

* the nature of book festivals (see misanthropism, cynicism above and elsewhere).

Worksheet #2

It is two days since we went to the Tattoo and our shoes are still drying…

***

I just sent away a bio note for an online publication (not naming names, but it wouldn’t take much sleuthing once the new edition appears):

Craig Cliff was born in Palmerston North and currently lives in Edinburgh; since the beginning of the Scottish summer he has purchased three umbrellas.

I sent the submission on the 7th of April, 2007. For the non-mathematicians: that’s a fifteen and a half month wait for acceptance.

***

Edinburgh #3

We clutter under the sun
but the mourning will continue—
some things never arrive.

***

The lock on our front door has been temperamental this week. Some days it takes two minutes of jiggling to get the key right in. This morning I got home after another free reading at the Book Festival (Gee Williams read a story called ‘Hiatus’) to find my downstairs neighbour jiggling. We had a wee chat as he jiggled. The woman who lives above me arrived back with a newspaper and a coffee. The man kept jingling. He asked if I wanted to try. I did. We got in, eventually.

***

What does the above have to do with the weather? Well, I figured out why the key goes in fine some days, and is a bugger the next: rain. That is, if it’s raining, no problems. If it’s dry, good luck getting in. I’ll leave it to the chemists among us to explain the hows and whys. But I think the lock is trying to tell us something: It’s not raining, so what the F- - - are you doing going inside!

2008 Edinburgh Military Tattoo: In Pictures

Could this be a performance without rain?


In every crowd, there's a pessimist.

I mean: realist.

An entire stand of realists.

The reality...

...of summer in Scotland.

Mestival

It rained for forty hours straight. Trains stopped running because tunnels were flooded (I would have thought tunnels were inherently sheltered places, but no). My shoes, wet since Wednesday morning, didn’t dry until midday Friday.

It wasn't the sort of week where you spontaneous see a show... even with so much on.

MacBeth Blow Out

Saturday we were supposed to go to two shows, but got carried away making a feast for three…

...that we had to run to catch the bus to make it to the George IV Bridge to see Burn Out MacBeth at 6:15pm. We got off the bus at 6:13pm. According to our cursory look at the map before hand, The Vault was just on a street running off George IV Bridge. It only sunk in when we were standing on the bridge that it was more likely the street ran beneath the bridge rather than through it. We quickly spotted the big Fringe Venue sign in a courtyard down below, but then had to figure out how to get there from the bridge. Did I mention the tour buses had just unloaded all of their tattoo-goers, who were plodding up the bridge to the royal mile? We chose to run down Chambers Street, then down an alley to get to the Cowgate, then another alley to find our courtyard. By the time we had been escorted to the Vault Annex it was 6:20pm and we were informed by the man on the door that the curtain had just gone up (I’ve yet to see a show at this festival with a curtain…) and did we want to exchange our tickets for anything else (it was the last performance of Burn Out MacBeth). All the shows on offer clashed with the aforementioned feast for three / making an appearance at birthday drinks / the other show we had tickets for, so we just walked back home.

At least the rain had stopped.

It turned out our feast for three was now a feast for two (damn poor people needing to work).

But I did see a show our second show of the evening.

Unfortunately.

Jaik Campbell – The Audacity of Hopelessness
10:50pm Saturday 9 August

This was another show I didn’t choose. I’m not trying to blame anyone, just explaining that I didn’t know Jaik Campbell stammered until I saw on a poster in the bathroom at Espionage that his show was sponsored by the British Stammering Association. Okay, I thought, so now I know this guy’s angle. I didn’t think it was that big a deal -- didn’t even mention it to Marisa before the show started -- and ultimately it wasn’t the stammering that stood between me and enjoyment. It was the fact he wasn’t funny.

Some comedians, the strength of their delivery, their on stage persona, covers the weakness of their material. With Jaik Campbell it was almost the weakness of his delivery that smoothed over the shoddy jokes. bAlmost.

I spent most of the time being bugged by his use of stuttering and stammering synonymously. Anyone who has read Black Swan Green will know they’re different beasties.

I learnt after the show that Jaik Campbell has performed more than 800 stand-up shows. It’s great that stand-up has helped with his confidence and lessened the severity of his speech impediment, but his show on Saturday never made the leap from self-improvement to entertainment.

Fringe Sunday
11am-5pm Sunday 10 August, The Meadows

More free-ness yesterday. The weather was like a 'Summer in Edinburgh' highlight package: picnic in the sun, dark clouds roll in, torrential rain, sun again, people walking in the mud.

We were lucky to have wedged our way inside the Comedy tent just before the torrential rain portion of the day. Of the five or six comedians we saw, none were so memorable that I looked them up in the Fringe Programme when I got home.

In addition to Comedy, there was a Theatre tent, one for Cabaret, and one for New Music. Then there were several outdoor stages, and plenty of buskers with nothing to construct their theatre with but the sodden grass and a ring of people. (I wonder what happened to them when the heavens opened?)

It was a pretty cool way to spend an afternoon. Definitely a lot to see. Pity the weather added an element of stress to what should have been the ultimate feel good Fringe experience.

Festival Kicks Off

You may have gathered from my last post that festival time has arrived in Edinburgh. I hope to review as many of the things I see as possible -- as a record of my experience and a way of rewarding good shows with positive vibes.

Money and time situations being what they are, I’ll be going to quite a few free shows and readings… They could probably do with more positive vibes than the folks getting paid to perform, but everyone deserves an honest review, eh?

And perhaps another disclaimer is called for: I didn’t choose all the shows I’ll be seeing (heck, I don’t know what half of them are about), so they might not all be up my (or your) alley.

*

Today was the Edinburgh Festivals’ Cavalcade, which was basically a good old Kiwi Christmas parade, just without Santa and eight times more pipe bands. Most of the paraders/floats were tied to a festival act in some way, so there were a lot of flyers being handed out. The only decision it helped me make was that don’t want to see anything relating to the American High School Theatre Festival (a festival I didn’t knew existed until today). Even the name makes me cringe. Imagine: High School Musical performed by the kids who lap that shit up - - the one’s who were socially awkward till discovering drama/dance/whatever and suddenly ‘blossom’ into miasmas of bad taste and misplaced confidence. And the sooner kids stop wearing belt-sized fluro tutus and long white socks, the sooner I’ll reconsider my prejudices against teenage theatre.

*

Last night we went out for dinner (Café Marlayne – highly recommended) and happened to walk along the Royal Mile when people were queueing for the second show of the Military Tattoo. That was a lot of people.

And around the university, the place has been transformed. Think a music festival, except for comedy.

There’s still a few pockets of festival activity I haven’t checked out. But hey, it’s only the first weekend.

Status Report: Week Twenty-Two

Week Twenty-Two – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 13,257 words (target is 19,124 words per week)

Average: rubbish (1,894 words per day)

Most productive day: Thursday 29 May, 3,049 words

Least productive day: Friday 30 May, 794 words

Year-to-date: 394,732 words (23,301 words behind target)

Shocking week. Monday (bank holiday) was spent at St. Andrews. Tuesday was spent recovering from the long weekend (and the return to work). So the word counts were already dire before our friend Laura from NZ arrived on Friday. She’ll be staying with us till she finds a place of her own…

Not having a room of my own to write was a bit of a pain before, but I can see I’m going to have to do something drastic like wake up in the wee small hours if I’m going to write anything focussed during the week.

Oh, and we went to the Edinburgh Sevens Saturday and today (Sunday) with a flock of other New Zealanders. I say flock, because, well, a picture tells a thousand words:

(NB: I didn’t actually count those “thousand words” towards today’s word count… I wish I could have.)

Crazy weekend weather-wise. Yesterday was a scorcher from the moment we stepped outside at 8:30am to when we got home after six. When I say scorcher, I mean for Edinburgh’s standards. It was definitely in the twenties centigrade. Felt like a lot more in those white boiler suits. Then today it rained… all day.

But New Zealand won the tournament (quite comfortably). Both DJ Forbes and Chad Tuoro made a point of coming over and thanking the sheep for their support. Or in Tuoro’s words, “You guys are awesome, eh.”

Sometimes it pays to be a sheep.

The Fern and The Thistle

This from the latest International Institute of Modern Letters’ newsletter:

A press release from the Scottish Poetry Library:

New Zealand is about as far as it’s possible to get from Scotland. Yet there are strong cultural links between the two nations, and a new initiative is bringing them together online.

Organised by the Scottish Poetry Library, The Fern and The Thistle will feature writers based in Scotland introducing their favourite New Zealand poets. The SPL hopes this will evolve into a poetry exchange, giving New Zealand readers the chance to discover Scottish poets in their turn.

As well as discovering New Zealand poetry online, Scottish readers will be able to borrow some of the best contemporary New Zealand poetry ­– the Scottish Poetry Library has recently acquired a new collection of over 60 books, thanks to funding from Creative New Zealand, and will be adding to this collection over the next few years.

The Fern and The Thistle will be launched with a live reading from Scottish and New Zealand poets Andrew Johnston and Gerrie Fellows, at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh (29 May) and New Zealand House in London (28 May).

There are probably only a handful of people who receive the Wellington-based IIML’s newsletter in a position to pop along to the Scottish Poetry Library on a Thursday evening in late May… and I’m one.

Bless.

I have been dipping in and out of the Scottish version of Best Poems 2007 ever since I read and blogged about the NZ version.

The truth is, I wasn’t grabbed by any of the poems in Scotland’s 2007 edition. I think this is purely a reflection of the editor’s taste and mine not meshing. That’s fine. I’ve started going back through previous years (well, I’m halfway through ’06) and already I feel like I’ll be coming home from the Scottish Poetry Library with more than NZ writers.

One area I feel prepared to make a comparison (and the inevitable value judgement) in regards to NZ vs Scottish Best Poems is the additional material. When you click on a poem from the contents page of the NZ site you get the poem, plenty of space, and links to an ‘Author’s Note’ and ‘Sources’. The Author’s Notes are generally brief, incorporating a few lines from the poet regarding the chosen poem – a glimpse inside the process rather than a historiography.

This layout achieves two things. It puts the poems in pride of place. And it acknowledges that this is a jumping off point for readers hoping to discover more about NZ poetry and/or find a new favourite poet, and equips readers with the knowledge to find more by the author.

When you click on a poem on the Scottish site, you get it all on one page. First there’s the poem, then scroll down a little and there’s the source, then an ‘Author’s Note’ (which almost always exceeds the size of the poem itself). After more scrolling (some of these Author’s Notes are looong), there’s an ‘Editor’s Comment’, then ‘Biography’ (of the poet, not the editor), though if you scroll down some more… no, just some Related Links.

Phew.

The problem with all this extra information is the poem invariably gets dwarfed by this other information. This is most pronounced on the page for Leonard McDermid’s poem, ‘Night River’. The poem is 21 words long. The Extras run to 693 words.

Too often information is repeated in the Author’s and Editor’s comments, and some of the poets – perhaps giddy at the freedom of prose and no word limit (?) – over-explain their own work. Rather than illuminate, these long notes threaten to extinguish the wonder and mystery of the poems.

Look back again at the NZ site. For the Author’s Note to my favourite poem of the bunch we geta one-line bio of Geoff Cochrane, then:

Cochrane comments: ‘The “Nigel” of the poem is the novelist Nigel Cox, author of Tarzan Presley.

New Zealand is a place of beaches and bays; Nigel did his dying within a stone’s throw of the sea, and I thought that sane and smart. His remarks about writing (his writer’s takes on writing) are also sane and smart – some of the smartest ever made.’

That’s what I mean by illuminating. That’s what I mean by not extinguishing wonder and mystery.

Perhaps this is overstating things.

What about: It's like the build up and post mortem of a football match: a little might be enlightening, but too much and it’s tedious.

I’m not bagging out the Scottish poems, just observing that the layout and peripherals of the NZ site do a better job of highlighting poems and poets worthy of further exploration.

The 2006 edition of the Best Scottish Poems shares the all-in-one-page format and includes editor’s comments, but it’s all a lot more succinct. I like the poems more in this edition (so far), but I think this is mostly due to my tastes being closer to Janice Galloway’s (2006 editor) than Alan Spence’s (2007 editor).

If I ever wind up unemployed in 2008 (and not shackled to my desk, chasing insane daily word count targets) I fancy holing myself up at the SPL and coming up with my own list for 2008.

The SPL also stocks NZ poetry, so I'll probably have two lists to compile. Before I started reading the Scottish edition, I thought I could maybe eek out a few generalisations about poetry in one or t’other country based on their 'Best' sites, but as Janice Galloway says in her 07 introduction:

On comparing these collections to draw national conculsions: In this age of ready translation, international web access and mass publication, poetry need have no nationality… Whatever the hell we like enters our thinking and motivation as writers, thinkers, believers. Our truest work is to say so. The poets here are too full of other things, wider things. More humane, more humble and yet more confident things. More thrawn things. Here's to that.

Yes, here’s to that.

Thunderstruck

I just saw lightening and heard thunder for the first time in maybe a year. When I lived in Brisbane thunder storms were as common as stubby coolers (why stubby coolers don’t have their own Wikipedia page is beyond me). In summer, you could set your watch by the storms (start at 3 o’clock, done by half past).

But thunder and lightening in Edinburgh? It just doesn’t seem right.

The downpour that followed the flash’n’crash lasted 6:40. I know coz I was listening to Tool’s ‘Ænema’, which is a great storm song.

[Aside: In 2002, Tool came to Wellington. A university acquaintance asked me if I was going to the concert. I said yes. He said, “You are so Palmerston North.” By-the-by: I didn’t rate the concert, and haven’t listened to Tool’s last few albums, but every time I listen to Ænema (the album) I’m not disappointed.]

I’ve been slowly but persistently reminded this week that I don’t know much about Edinburgh. I arrived in autumn, I’ve done winter, am ensconced in spring, but summer promises to be something quite different. Just this week there has been an explosion of people dining al fresco, wearing shorts, and playing frisbee in St Andrews Square at five o’clock. This is a side of Edinburgh I don’t remember seeing when we arrived in September, even though the weather was reasonable. I guess there’s a big difference between a good day in spring (after the slog of Winter) and a good day in Autumn (after better days just weeks before).

This also reminds me that I haven’t had a proper summer in over a year. We were in Australia/NZ/Southern Africa for the Southern Hemisphere’s winter 07, then switched hemispheres in time for the tail end of an Indian Summer in Italy/Croatia, but it quickly went to pot as we ventured further north through Europe.

I’m not sure what to expect from summer in Edinburgh. I should probably expect everything: shit days, sunny days, storms, floods, midges, sunburn, windburn, frostbite…

As long as I can wear my jandals once a week, I’ll be happy.

PS: I lied. I witnessed a storm in Venice in August. My brother the photographer took this photo:

In Search of Another Edinburgh

I have been living in Edinburgh for six months now. Six months is long enough to know there is more to this city than Old Town vs New Town. Long enough to get a bit spoilt by the oldness of everything. To forget to lean out the window and spy the castle on a sunny day. To pull the curtains, without blinking, on “the best example of Neo-classical Georgian architecture in Edinburgh” (I’m quoting a guidebook I read in Matalan the other day while waiting for Marisa to finish browsing), aka West Register House.

I still believe I will never arrive in another city and think, "This is more amazing than the time I walked up the steps from the Waverley Train Station for the first time." But sometimes I like to see things that won’t be mentioned in guidebooks, grace postcards, or appear on your bog standard travel blog.

There is another Edinburgh out there, smushed between the castles and kirkyards, you just have to go looking.

So that’s what Marisa and I set out to do today.

But first we had to drop some books off at the library, which meant walking through the daffodil-overloaded Princes Street Gardens and up the Mound to the George IV bridge. It’s hard to think of a more iconic twenty minute walk in Edinburgh. Anywho, we then struck out for new ground, and found a mosque and a decaying office building on the edges of the university.

This is more like it, I thought.

We powered on past St. Leonards (Rebus’ Police Station… ur… ) and into Newington. We passed the Scottish Widows offices, which Marisa said reminded her of Christchurch. I agreed and took a photo.

But then we found ourselves so close to Salisbury Crags and Holyrood Park, and decided, since we hadn’t walked around Queens Drive this way, we might as well. Who knows what sort of Edinburgh we’d find.

It was a lovely walk (I sound like a nana when I say that, don’t I?), passing Duddingston Loch and the village (a village, ooh!) of, ah, Duddington, and then we found ourselves half a mile from Craigmillar Castle. We decided to have a nosy, see what the admission price was, etc. When we got to the carpark, there was a Scottish Heritage person telling everyone it was free to look around the castle today (usually it’s £4.20 or something).

So we set out looking for the un-Edinburgh, and ended up at a castle! This says a lot about Edinburgh, but also that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’re still tourists after six months.

I like free stuff...

Found this in my inbox today from the Edinburgh: City of Literature

There’s Nowhere to Hyde This February...

This month, we’re gearing up for One Book – One Edinburgh 2008, and aiming to get the whole city reading Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Free copies of the book will be distributed to high schools in the city, to every public library and to partner organisations and from 22nd February members of the public can drop into their local library and claim a free copy while stocks last. All city libraries will stock copies of the book which can be borrowed for free once all the One Book – One Edinburgh copies have been claimed.

I’ll be one of those scrambling for a free book on the 22nd. What can I say, I like books and I’m cheap.

I started another day job today, so I’ll be squeezing out (or trying to) 3,000 words in the dark hours before and after work – my own Jekyll and Hyde existence if you will.

Will blog about Stevenson’s book in due course.

Insider’s tip: expect some Jekyll and Hyde influenced prose to appear on the blog too.