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.
Tag Archives: Edinburgh
Morning sun on Hutchison Crossway.
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’.
Sainsbury’s, Meadowbank.
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.
Dalry Road, Edinburgh.
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.
The Foot of the Walk (FOTW), Leith.
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.
Crawling about Leith.
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.
The Waverley – never forget.
The Shangri-La.
I try to avoid my former place of work these days because the experiences – which belong to what I refer to as the East Coast Epoch 2010-2012 – were so epic. Not epic like a Wagner-infused helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now (1979), but something a little bit more transcendent – the comedy and the banter. And I’ve never seen so many fruitcakes in all my life. Public spaces involving transport are microcosms of society. People are nuts.
My fondness for The Waverley is probably nostalgia, pretending in retrospect it was more enjoyable than it was. But it’s like that with most memories; time adds gloss to the mundane. I do, however, know more about trains than any topic aside from the drug and dietary habits of Adolf Hitler. So there’s always that.
Edinburgh – The Fringe is balls.
This video (gone viral) nails the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Whoever made it, kudos.
Personally, I’ve always despised the thing. It’s merely an invitation for dumb-as-a-stump tourists to clog up the streets and gaze at the castle with this eternally perplexed idiotic expression as if it were an alien spacecraft. The drinks prices go up, the shows are a shower of shit, and there’s a 400% influx in the number of scruffy art student wankers congregating on street corners like pseudo-bohemian jackals, sharing their very limited ideas (like taking a dump on a canvas) with anyone who will and won’t listen.
We don’t need them. I am not aware of anyone who lives here who actually enjoys this pish. We just tolerate the circus because apparently it brings the money in. I doubt that.
Morning chit-chat on Princes Street.
Wee bit of humanity in this one. Splendid.
Edinburgh – summer in the city.
Elm Row.
Abbeyhill.
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.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 