This Xmas market is an addiction. I don’t enjoy a single second meandering about its gruesome stalls, yet I continue to do so every year as it gets worse and worse in its lumbering pointlessness. The only parallel I can think of is watching Manchester United play football these days.
One day this is going to end. Best to savour it while it’s here.
Further reading:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-50446733
Meadowbank/Abbeyhill is drab and dreary for much of the year, and during the summer months approximates ‘peak chav’ when they all crawl out of the woodwork and luxuriate in the sweltering heat.
Winter on The Ranch is tolerable, however. The season has a calming effect on the locals as ‘Cloud City’ acts as the temporary backdrop.
Environmental determinism is real.
A rainbow above KFC at Meadowbank. This is quite the surreal moment.
Leith Street purgatory.
The traffic in Edinburgh is a sadistic abomination, something that would drive Michael Douglas out his car à la Falling Down (1993). Every fucking day there is a jam of jams, caused and compounded by traffic lights with a five-second gap between green and red, omniscient roadworks, never-ending tram extensions, a 20 mph speed limit, tourist questions to the bus driver as if he were a tourist information office, and Edinburgh’s much-vaunted position as the prime location for filming chav fodder (Fast & Furious, Avengers) in, which brings about all manner of diversions. The city is a conurbation of the slow.
Whose doing is this? I don’t know but I can tell you that Edinburgh Council are, in the words of John McEnroe, “The absolute pits of the world.” So I blame them whether it’s their fault or not.
Further reading:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-35812226
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17682291.edinburgh-named-as-worst-uk-city-for-traffic-jams/
Princes Street is ghastly – chavs galore and feckless tourists – but every Christmas it’s almost bearable. Because it rains and snows and people look fucking miserable. I like misery and I enjoy seeing people miserable. Great.
It doesn’t often look like this at Hutchison. For a very brief instant, things were cinematic. And then it was gone just as a beaten-up Ford Mondeo staggered into frame. This was my ‘Decisive Moment’.
I have been in this store more times than any other building in the history of my life. I have visited this shop on so many occasions that I could win a rebooted version of Supermarket Sweep blindfolded in record time; I know the location of every item and can blitz a £60 shop in under three minutes. I’ve conducted some cursory calculations and my conclusion is that I’ve graced the self-scan machines with my presence at least 3,500 times, which *must* be unique, unless I’m so solipsistic I’ve overlooked the fact that local working-class fanny magnet Fred (or whoever) has lived over the road for 40-odd years and ventures inside merely for chats.
Anyway, yesterday I saw a midget outside kick the fuck out of a trolley because ‘it’ stole his £1 coin. Scenes. He looked like Verne Troyer on steroids.
Arty-farty pretensions with this snap from Monday. Interestingly, there’s a graveyard coming up on the left there and I once saw a (presumably hammered) woman clutching a bottle of budget cider wander inside and take a shite in a bush.
All very Edinburgh.
I’m in here twice a week now in the afternoons. Unfortunately, I’m not getting plastered; I just take my wee lunch break in the dwelling and get stuck into a full fat Coca-Cola and do the Metro crossword and experience Coronation Street flashbacks. I’m surrounded by miserable loners, mostly old codgers in flat caps who speak very few words but scowl non-stop at everyone and everything. My kind of people.
Tweed jackets and bunnets are making a comeback.
As a scion of Gorgie, it is with great reluctance that I have ventured a lot more into Leith these days, and I for a brief moment feared I had gone Full-Anthropologist. It’s not as mingin’ as I initially thought. In fact, some of it is quite lovely.
No junkies were harmed in the taking of this photograph.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 