This gull had found a quiet spot to enjoy the sun we have had for the last few days but many more people were sunbathing in the Meadows, St Andrews Square or Portobello Beach. School and university are out for summer and the tourist season is in full swing. We were here mainly to get some work done on the flat but managed to escape for dinner with some friends on Sunday evening and for a trip to the Jazz Club on Monday evening. The Jazz and Blues Festival runs from 14-23 July before the main Festival and Fringe start. The Jazz Club’s resident Big Band were participating on this occasion. An early evening meal at Biblos which is almost next door meant we were first in the queue when the doors opened. Seating is fairly restricted at the venue and I did not feel like standing for a couple of hours that evening. Biblos has live music sessions in the B Bar throughout the year in Fridays and Saturdays. Here is the Big Band getting ready to perform in the Jazz Bar.
One of the festival staff asked whether I had seen them before and I had to explain that until this summer I had a choir rehearsal on Monday evenings and until last summer had to be in Liverpool early on Tuesday morning so Monday evenings in Edinburgh were not possible. He said the band had played every Monday evening for the last 10 years. The Jazz bar also runs jam sessions in the later part of the evening during the festival. Musicians can just turn up with their instrument and tell the door staff they want to play. Admission is free. They often have music going on until 5am. We enjoyed the selection of music from the Big Band but left well before morning. I made a note to get on with learning to play the alto saxophone. Wednesday was still very warm although overcast and we had a fairly uneventful drive home.
Tag: Edinburgh
Spring in Edinburgh and discovering another art gallery
On Wednesday morning I was standing on the northbound platform at Crewe Station. The destination board said that the train was going to Edinburgh however the display on the door of my carriage said, ‘next stop Tamworth’, which was a little disconcerting. Fortunately, we did leave heading in the right direction and before 7.30am were at Warrington where the train spotters were already out on the platform. I was going up to Edinburgh a few days ahead of James to get some spring cleaning done but did find time to explore a gallery I have not been in before. The Talbot Rice Gallery is in Old College and free to enter. Old College is undergoing some renovation now but the dome was still visible.
One of the exhibitions was Between Poles and Tides comprising new acquisitions from the university collection and focusing on elemental forces, natural rhythms, destruction, social discord and displacement. It consists of works by David Batchelor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ilana Halperin, Jessica Harrison, Fabienne Hess, Daniel Hughes, Daisy Lafarge, Jonathan Owen, Katie Paterson, Isobel Turley, Luc Tuymans and JL Williams
I particularly enjoyed Ilana Halperin’s works which were new to me
Paterson’s Future Library
and works by a familiar artisit, Ian Hamilton Finlay. Here is Les Femmes de la Revolution after Anselm Kefer
and Bicentenary Tricolour
Also on display was The Torrie Collection, the University of Edinburgh’s founding art collection being exhibited in the Georgian interior of Gallery 2. It consists mainly of Dutch and Flemish 17th and 18th century painting and Renaissance sculpture.
Back at the flat, the cherry tree outside is in flower, a little earlier than usual. The wood pigeons enjoy the petals
The wood pigeons were enjoying the petals
and some passers-by spent ages taking photographs of the tree, selfies with the tree in the background and persuading one of my neighbours to take a shot of them both. I think they were Japanese and perhaps missing the cherry blossom back home.
On the way home through the borders we saw some of the first upland lambs. Lambing in the uplands lasts from mid March to May so there will be many more on my next trip.
Two cities and a woodland walk in one weekend
On Friday morning, I had a meeting to attend in Liverpool. Although I have retired, I still sit as a lay person on the Ethics Committee of the Fertility Unit at the Women’s Hospital. It is only four times each year and I enjoy meeting former colleagues again and engaging in what can be quite challenging discussions. On arrival at Lime Street Station I noticed that the block on the corner of Skelhorne Street and Bolton Street was being re-developed. There was a 24-hour convenience store there and I wondered where the guys I used to see at 8 am sitting on the station steps with their cans of Carlsberg and a morning cigarette were getting their supplies from now.
The meeting finished a little early so I headed back into town to pick up a couple of things. I always enjoy walking down Bold Street. There are independent shops including two bookshops, one of which is the radical bookshop, News from Nowhere. There is an art materials store, two outdoor shops, some vintage emporia and coffee shops amongst others. On Friday, I had to limit myself to popping into the Oxfam shop. It has had a re-vamp since my last visit. I did find a few National Geographic volumes to fill in the gaps in my collection. This comprises a few bound volumes given to me by my uncle which start in 1948, some my parents had from the 1960s and 70s and others I have picked up at various times. I currently subscribe and am filling in the gaps. I wonder if it was one of the drivers for my wanderlust as I have been reading it and enjoying the photography since childhood. I read the current issue on the train into Liverpool and learnt about the mistreatment of widows in Uganda who are expected to give up their children, land, homes and themselves to their in-laws when their husband dies. This is a cultural tradition, not a law so charities and others are working to challenge this.
In the city centre, a busker was playing Bruce Springsteen songs. I found what I needed quickly. I got back to Lime Street just as my train was pulling in and a group of guys from Glasgow were arriving all wearing T shirts announcing Lewis’s Stag Do. Back in Crewe, I saw a few slightly unusual vehicles. A Morris Minor was parked next to me in the car pack and had a sticker from the Annual Morris Minor Rally 2016 in the window. This is not an event I have heard of before. I passed a Landrover Defender with so much equipment stacked on top of it, it looked like it was about to embark on major trip in Australian outback, not drive through Crewe. Perhaps the owner runs off-road driving experience events. On the A534 I passed a vintage fire engine and have no idea where it was going. I was happy that I had clocked up 4.3 miles of walking as there were 250 miles to do in the car later that evening.
We hit the road as soon as James got back from work. There were numerous accidents incidents and roadworks along our stretch of the M6 so I took the A50 north in the dark & rain. Joining the motorway on the slip road at junction 20 was the first of three occasions where a vehicle (this time a truck) moved out of his lane sideways and almost pushed me into the crash barrier. I managed to avoid him, another HGV and a car who also tried to shift me sideways into the outside lane when I was overtaking. Otherwise, the journey was uneventful and we got to Edinburgh before midnight.
We were in Edinburgh this weekend as the Six Nations Rugby Tournament begins and the Scotland-Ireland match was at Murrayfield. Here is the ground just before the match started:
Scotland won after a very exciting game. That evening we went to our local cinema to see Trainspotting 2 relaxing on their sofas and had walked 8.4 miles.
On Sunday morning, I popped into the Secret Herb Garden at Old Pentland to pick up a new lovage plant and then continued south to Dawyck Botanical Garden which has just re-opened after its winter closure. It concentrates on trees, shrubs and woodland plants.
As we entered, the woman on the welcome desk congratulated us on having brought the sun with us. The snowdrops were out and other spring plants were starting to emerge.
The leafless deciduous trees made their trunks more prominent. This is Betula utilis from the Himalaya. Lichens were also prominent:
A research project was underway and I need to learn about the relationship between lichens and the trees they grow on.
I spotted a sculpture which has been installed since our last visit ‘Gentle Presence’ by Susheila Jamieson.
We continued south on a B road which parallels the motorway as far as Gretna Green and then picking up the A6 in Carlisle. I am looking at the route I will walk next summer, spotting things to visit, great views between Penrith and Shap and places to stay. By the time we were back on the motorway the sun had set and we had a quiet run home.
New Year in Edinburgh
We saw the New Year in quietly at home as James had worked a 12 hour day and then driven up here on Thursday and we had been out celebrating his birthday with friends on the 30th. The 31st had dawned with high winds which were blowing down all the barriers being erected in the city centre for the Hogmanay celebrations that evening. It then rained for a few hours in the afternoon. I had been contemplating doing some firework photography from Blackford Hill as the weather did improve a little. However, I could see myself slipping in the mud with all my equipment in the dark and thought better of it. New Year’s Day began quietly as some of my neighbours are away and one is a taxi driver who had been working last night. After coffee with friends who popped in to deliver a Christmas present, we needed some exercise and headed up Blackford Hill. The dog-walkers, kite-flyers and some runners were all out and a few others who like me were hoping so see a good sunset. The darkest clouds were moving away to the southwest but the sun remained mostly hidden as it set.
As we walked downhill towards the Observatory, I spotted this guy who was playing Auld Lang Syne on the top of one of the hillocks.
Enjoying the sun in Edinburgh
This morning I braved the tourists and sales shoppers to buy some post-Christmas birthday presents in the city centre. The roads were fairly quiet but the pavements were full of people. I had to step into the road to avoid the horde who were taking pictures of Greyfriars Bobby. My purchases completed, I headed back to the flat via the West End. I always have a look at the mural on St John’s Church which is usually very challenging. As I could not take a photograph due to the building work going on around it, here is the Christmas photograph for 2016 taken from their Facebook page:
Back at the Meadows it was sunny enough for some people to sit out.
At the flat the sun on the bare cherry tree branches made a very abstract pattern and might turn into an abstract painting one day.
A wood pigeon was waddling around feeding underneath. Almost every house I have lived in has had wood pigeons in the garden or next door. I think the only exception was a student flat in Aberdeen where there were no trees nearby. One year I was doing the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch which takes place at the end of January each year, in Edinburgh. I did not expect to see as many different birds as I do in my garden in Cheshire but it was rather cold and frosty and I counted 18 wood pigeons on one shrub eating the red berries.
Now that the trees are bare, I could see the sun disappearing behind the west end of the Pentland Hills through the trees next door. Some energetic people were watching it from the top of Blackford Hill which must have given them a great view but I walked 4.7 miles this morning so I was content to look out of my window.
If you are after the precise timings of sunrise/sunset/moonrise etc there is a very useful piece of software for use on a computer or as a mobile app which can give the timings on any given date, anywhere on earth:
http://photoephemeris.com/
I am continuing to read David Bain’s book and have just read the chapters on Wyoming. I recall driving through the places he describes, seeing the Medicine Bow and Wasatch Mountains and learning about the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians by US Cavalry in 1864. I also remember passing through Medicine Bow and seeing the Virginian Hotel, the most impressive building in the town. It is often said to be the place that Owen Wister wrote the novel ‘The Virginian’.It became one of the cowboy shows on TV during my childhood. However, Bain knows that the hotel was built in 1911, 11 years after the novel had been published. There were also significant dinosaur fossil finds in the area, many of which are now displayed in museums in New York and Washington. Bain and his family stayed in the Virginian Hotel and found themselves in a room over the bar and could hear the music and noise all night plus the early departure of railroad construction crews who were also staying there. We had a similar experience when we walked the West Highland Way in 2009. We stayed at the Drovers Inn at Inverarnan, a historic hostelry. Our room was above the bar and unfortunately, Friday night was music night. Added to that it was someone’s 40th birthday. Over at breakfast next morning which is served in the newer building over the road, I said maybe we would have been quieter in a room in that building. Another couple told us that it had been quiet until 1am when the birthday party contingent had noisily returned to their rooms shouting that they had never been so drunk in their lives. I shall be more careful when selecting rooms in the future.
Reading about travelling westward on the train north
England was beginning to move again yesterday after the Christmas break but not for long as the M6 was completely stationary in both directions last night and other roads were reporting problems. I was glad that I was taking the train this morning. Scotland is recovering from two severe storms over Christmas, while in Northern England we had much less severe wind and rain. We left the house in frosty darkness with all the stars visible as James took me to the station. In the lounge, I watched a TV programme highlighting the benefits recent wet summers and mild winters have had for farmers who have could keep animals outside for longer and cut more hay from the long grass but also the adverse impact it has had on many insects and wildflowers that need shorter grass to survive and birds such as barn owls who cannot see their prey in longer grass and whose numbers are declining. Yet another consequence of climate change.
Not driving meant that I could dip into a book I found on Tuesday at Cavern Books, Dagfields, near Nantwich: http://www.cavernbooks.co.uk/. It is David Haward Bain’s The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads and the Urge to Go West. In 2000, the author (who is an established non-fiction writer and academic at a Vermont college) travelled along the routes followed by the early rail road, Lincoln Highway, California, Oregon and Pony Express trails with his family. He had more time than we could squeeze out of our jobs on our transcontinental drive and has researched and added much of the associated history along the way, including that of his own grandmother’s family. There is also a selection of old photographs in the book.
He began in Missouri, travelling north up the river valley from Kansas City and Independence where the California and Oregon trails often began. We passed through St Louis on our Route 66 drive before continuing southwest and here is the Lewis & Clark memorial by the river:
At Omaha, his route coincided with the Lincoln Highway on Route 30 and our drive as we entered Nebraska on R30 from Iowa.
One of the things I enjoyed in Nebraska was the prairie grass in the Cottonmill Park near Kearney.
By the time I had reached this stage of his book, dawn had broken in South Lancashire and the sun was fully up well before we reached Carlisle. The Cumbrian hills were covered in frost and mist but there were still large pools of water in the fields in southern Scotland. As I emerged from the station in Edinburgh, it was much milder. The city is gearing up for the Hogmanay celebrations and it will get much busier over the next two days. I shed my woollies and as I walked to the shops from the flat, noticed large numbers of branches on the ground from the surrounding trees. I will be out tomorrow to do a few things in town and looking forward to Friday to meeting friends and celebrating James’s birthday.
A second open door in Edinburgh
Today’s Open Door for Advent was Summerhall. The 100-year-old building was the University of Edinburgh’s Veterinary School until 2011 but is now an events and arts hub with workshops and workspaces, exhibitions, a café, several event spaces and Pickering’s Gin Distillery. I had been in town to do a few things and on the way to Summerhall walked up Clerk Street. Like most urban areas, shops and businesses have closed in Edinburgh and some new ones have opened. For the circus performers among you, there is now a juggling shop on Clerk Street and the other thing that attracted my attention as I walked along was a notice in a shop window advertising ‘Lesbian Donkey for Sale’.
I was a little early for the exhibition tour at Summerhall so wandered around some of the open rooms. The old anatomy lecture theatre is one of the few remaining with wooden seating:
The dissection room has large windows on one side unlike the one at my medical school in Marischal College in Aberdeen which was in the basement and known as ‘The Drain’.
However, the old lab was very reminiscent of school science labs.
At two, the tour of the exhibitions began and the group was smaller than yesterday so we could chat with each other. Our guide, Sergio Madrigal, was extremely knowledgeable about the work of Ross Fraser McLean whose exhibition was entitled ‘Ceiba – Casa de Todos Los Muertes’. He had spent eight months exploring death in Mexico from both socio-political and spiritual stand points. The exhibition includes photography, music and installations in the old vet school specimen display cabinets.
The cabinets contain Mexican craft artefacts, offerings of flowers, fruit and vegetables left to decay like offerings on an altar and other objects documenting Mexican life and death.
It took almost an hour to even begin to absorb everything on display. We had a brief look at another gallery and then I had to leave. Ceiba continues until 23 December and we were told about another in the old church which is part of the complex. This exhibition chronicles the life of women in Yemen after the recent wars and is part a portrait exhibition but also comments on how their life has changed and the many ways in which gains in freedom have now been reversed. That and a tour of the gin distillery must wait for another day. On the way out I noticed there was a Thermos Museum, another time perhaps.
Opening the door to history in Edinburgh
Like Jim Perrin whose book I was reading on the train last night, I always enjoy finding new things or revisiting old favourites in familiar places. My first port of call this morning was the Assembly Rooms in George Street, the first Advent Door to be opened. I joined the 11am guided tour with a small crowd and heard about the various adaptations and renovations of the current building since it was opened in 1787, the most recent being completed in 2012. It replaced buildings in the old town which were described by Youngson in his book The Making of Classical Edinburgh as providing opportunities for ‘dancing. This – as a later age would have thought of it – unpresbyterian diversion was carried on in the form of public assemblies in the Old Assembly Room in the West Bow as early perhaps as 1710’. Here is an illustration of that building:
That Assembly and its predecessor did not only provide entertainment for the upper classes but also raised funds for the support of the poor. After the last renovation, the building is now a venue for conferences, exhibitions and weddings. They are keen to advertise their green credentials but no mention of supporting the poor. It does have a fabulous ballroom:
Here is one of the Coade Sybils in the Crush:
and a chandelier in the later drawing room made from pressed rather than cut glass:
The music room was lit in red for World Aids Day
I ended the day at the Queen’s Hall enjoying the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert:
SIBELIUS
Valse Triste
Scene with Cranes
MAXWELL DAVIES
Strathclyde Concerto No 2
BARTOK
Divertimento
MAXWELL DAVIES
An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise – this last piece with the obligatory dram for the conductor, cheers from the orchestra and a finale with a piper.
On the rails in the dark
Most of my train journeys to Edinburgh are in the early morning with good views of the Cumbrian hills and the Southern Uplands. Not so on this occasion, I was on the last train in the evening. In the week or so leading up to my trip yesterday evening there had been innumerable reports of problems on the rail network so I was not hopeful. As it turned out, my train was only three minutes late and I was soon installed in my seat with a coffee in front of me. The staff member in the carriage explained that due to staff sickness there would be no at-seat service in first class after Preston and plied us with enough food and wine to take us all the way to our destination. The wine came in a plastic bottle which I will hang on to as they are useful means of carrying alcohol into festivals where glass is forbidden for obvious reasons. I settled into the rest of my journey with Jim Perrin’s ‘Travels with a Flea and other Eccentric Journeys’, a collection of his essays on trips to various parts of the world and around his home in Wales. We arrived in Edinburgh on time and although my usual short cut to the bus stop was blocked by the ice rink and Christmas market, I did get a quick shot with my phone of the castle lit up in blue for St Andrews Day just before the bus pulled in.
I came up a little earlier than James and my father who will drive up on Friday afternoon as I wanted to fit in some last-minute Christmas shopping. I then discovered several things that will distract me from shopping. Firstly, Edinburgh is doing something a little different for the festive season this year. Each day from the 1st December to the 24th they are opening a building or part of a building which is not usually accessible to the public. The event, which is free, is entitled 24 Doors of Advent. Each day from 1-24th December, a different building or part of one not usually open to the public, will open its doors for a day.
I plan to visit the venues for the 1st and 2nd and possibly the 3rd, depending upon the preferences of the others. I also discovered that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra are performing Peter Maxwell Davies’s ‘Orkney Wedding’ on Thursday evening so that is my treat for this evening.
Planning a long walk
I have been thinking about walking to Edinburgh from my home in Cheshire for quite some time. Various routes have come to mind, the first being using the Pennine Way. I am about 2 days or so from the southern start in Edale and then would need to find a route from the northern end in Kirk Yetholm to Edinburgh. To cut down the mileage a little I then pondered walking up the Macclesfield Canal which is close to home here to the end in Marple and then making my way to Standedge and the Pennine Way. However, even the canal is not a particularly direct route as it weaves around quite a bit even before it gets to Macclesfield. I then read about a guy who walked from Boston to San Francisco (a really long walk). When he was asked how he navigated, he replied ‘Google Maps’ saying that it kept him off the interstate and took him through places where there were services. So, what did it come up with for me?
The most direct route takes me on minor roads from my village to a short stretch of the A50. It then cuts across to pick up the A49 and eventually the A6 all the way to Carlisle. The A7 then goes as far as Langholm before switching to the B-road that climbs over Eskdalemuir to Yarrow and then on to Peebles. The most direct route stays with the A701 into Edinburgh and is 229 miles. I might switch to the A702 at West Linton and come in that way on my last day. That only adds a few miles and I would take around 15 days with a couple of slow days in the middle around Kendal (despite Google Maps listing 76 hours for the route!). The longest walks I have done so far have taken around 9-10 days in India. We have walked the West Highland Way, the Great Glen Way and the Speyside Way in the last few years but this would be longer. Although it follows main roads for much of the way, there will be footpaths and minor roads to divert along at times. Mostly the towns and hostelries are separated by a day’s walking which is good as I really do not want to have to carry my tent and camping equipment and if there is not a convenient campsite you cannot wild camp in England. This route is of course, the old route to Scotland from my part of the country before the motorways were built. Here is my great grandfather with his car at Shap on the A6 in Cumbria on his way to Scotland.
Before mechanised transport, if you could not afford a carriage journey, you walked. Thomas Carlyle walked from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh to start his university course and John Snow, who identified the cause of cholera, walked from York to London via Bath to start a new job. Others have more recently walked from John O’Groats to Lands End or around the whole coastline for charity. This is more a personal pilgrimage. It will probably not happen until late spring/early summer 2018 as we are away for much of the first half of 2017. I prefer to walk in Scotland at that time of year if possible as it is usually drier, the days longer and the midges fewer in number.