One day you need a Thunder Buddy, the next you’re in the throes of a heatwave. Welcome to Edinburgh, the bipolar, chav-strewn Athens of the North.
It was so scorching in Abbeyhill this afternoon that the newsagents were for once selling more bottles of water than fags. A day to remember.
Situated on the Royal Mile and in its current incarnation dated from the late 14th century, I’ve walked past it roughly 6,000 times yet have never been in the fucker. My reasons are multifarious, but one of them is that I don’t enjoy the manipulation, i.e., architectural determinism, of it all. The splendour I can enjoy from afar. Some find a solitude in churches; I just have visions of the terror they’ve inflicted, and this presently includes the tractor beam that pulls in hordes of cretin tourists. Sorry not sorry.
Snapped from Brewers Fayre. There’s something of the Americana about this chain of venues, with the free soft drink refills and Hooters-esque staff uniforms. I was in Dunfermline’s version of one of these ‘restaurants’ a decade ago and found the experience most distressing; come to think of it, this might have actually been a Frankie & Benny’s. No matter, they’re all interchangeable: tacky décor, borderline violent eaters, screaming kids running amok.
Newhaven itself is a curious mix of the old and new; flats are *always* being developed, little ships will always have their presence, and eateries such as Brewers Fayre will continue to splatter the waterfront.
This used to be the home of the infamous Shell garage, a post-3:00 a.m. drunken haven. There was nothing quite like their chicken stuffing sandwiches, especially when one was off one’s proverbial tits on a Smörgåsbord of £1 voddy and cokes from Rush Bar in the Cowgate. And how I miss the mangled chat with the bloke behind the glass. He clearly wanted to die but I still bombarded him with my life thoughts. 2005-2013 was a good fucking time in my life.
Greenpeace protesters are protesting at Shell garages in Edinburgh as a result of Shell exploring in the Arctic 16 July 2012
Now it’s an empty space. Sad. The land that is; not my existence. These days I get free Wi-Fi at work. 24/7 Clockwork Winning.
Writing is waterboarding of the mind, such is the rolling artillery barrage of stimuli out there. As a part-time aspiring Gonzo in the knock-off Hunter S. Thompson mould (I don’t do drugs for fear of dying before the real-life Matt Damon lands on Mars), I cannot construct a sentence if there is a Wi-Fi connection. Why pen anything when there is Wikipedia and a mammoth page dedicated to the Battle of Austerlitz (1805)?
One must be unplugged from The Matrix.
Here is my photographic … representation of even an attempt to write anything with a correctly placed comma. And all music must be Enya or Enigma or any other kind of chillout music, nothing too high-tempo.
This photo ripped an hour from my life, by the way.
It’s how I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald carved his stuff when Zelda was out in Lalaland off her tits on cocktails galore.
Rambling around Leith today taking snaps. The port district is ugly but it has character. I would wager it has the highest concentration of junkies and creatives per square mile than anywhere else in Scotland. Everyone knows someone who’s on the smack, yet conversely their next-door neighbour will have aspirations of being this generation’s Bukowski.
The pubs also ‘suffer’ from deflation.
Where are the tracksuits?
No chavs, no nutters, no shoplifters, no screaming kids, and not a single person this evening decided to whistle at the top of their lungs (vile behaviour which should be a private avocation).
What a rare day of serenity in Aldi.
“HS2 will change things.”
I remember the chat well. This was eight years ago when I was doing soul-destroying manual labour/customer service in Edinburgh Waverley train station. The job was well paid and a laugh – colleagues were cracking banter and all hit the sauce like pros – but the “civilians” who ventured into that station. Fucking hell. Never again. Members of the general public are the dregs of humanity.
Anyway, I heard this HS2 topic daily, a colossal event on the horizon. The railways in Britain are a shambles. No-one knows why and not a soul has a solution. It’s been like this for the past century. No-one knows why. HS2 is meant to be the panacea for the chaos.
HS2 trains, expected to be operating by December 2026, will be 400 metres long, travelling at up to 250 mph – the fastest in Europe, apparently – and able to hold 1,100 seats, the initial line between London and the West Midlands. Following this, ‘Phase 2’ will connect Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.
The new lines will connect to existing standard-speed lines, with ‘classic compatible’ trains running on both high-speed and classic lines. The idea is that classic lines will benefit from HS2. The London to Edinburgh journey time, for example, will be 3:38 hours instead of 4:23.
Guaranteed they will still cost a fucking fortune, though.
I can get a flight to Dublin for £6 but a train to London King’s Cross is £194. And this for the privilege of being sat on some rickety rocket chock-full of intoxicated bairns.
Trains are torture.
Further reading:
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/77763/hs2-route-uk-cities-development/
I fucking hate Princes Street. It’s dire, chock-full of stores that appear designed exclusively for desperate housewives. There are also mobile phone shops and a budget book place – this curious number sells no novels, the only items on display autobiographies of pointless celebrities and road maps of Denmark published in 2004. All very bizarre. Added to this is the plethora of American tourists crawling about with their bumbags on, elephants in the In Bruges (2008) sense.
Princes Street looked decent in 1858, though. No spackers to be seen here.
This feature-length Netflix release garnered mixed reviews (63% on Rotten Tomatoes) but I was quite impressed by it. The film doesn’t have the romantic sweep and scope of Braveheart (1995) but it excels in details – its gritty and grim depiction of Medieval warfare and the violent politics at the heart of the Wars of Scottish Independence.
The movie is brooding and deadly serious, and, shockingly, well acted. Chris Pine might just be the only Yank capable of pulling off a half-decent Scots accent. Every previous attempt at a Scottish brogue made by an actor – save Jonny Lee Miller in Trainspotting (1996) – has been disastrous, Groundskeeper Willie in the flesh. Pine thankfully doesn’t go OTT.
There’s no Battle of Bannockburn (1314) here, the movie acting as a sort of Batman Begins-esque ‘making of’ Robert the Bruce, the first act of a broader narrative. It’s decent – no superheroes in capes or one-liners, just chain mail and chopped heads. Proper carnage. The Glory Days.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 