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.
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.
Once upon a time, I went to Falkirk for a ‘night out’. I can’t remember a distinguishing characteristic about the place save that it was dodgy; it had a Chernobyl feel to it and the bar staff were more difficult to understand than a Klingon speaking in their native tongue. The wheel, however, was something I was convinced I knew well. I always thought it was a sort of Central Lowlands version of a vintage ferris wheel à la The Third Man (1949). I only found out the other day that it’s not a wheel as in a ferris wheel, but something functional and once again … not at all a ferris wheel.
It is in fact a boat lift which connects the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, and it’s quite the impressive achievement both aesthetically and from a purely engineering perspective. How I didn’t know this I … don’t know. I figure I was just lost in semantic confusion.
I might visit one day, and I now understand why Falkirk experiences a little bit of tourism. I would not, though, recommend its pubs to even Francis Begbie in his pomp.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.scottishcanals.co.uk/falkirk-wheel/plan-your-visit/
http://www.visitfalkirk.com/things-to-do/family-days-out/the-falkirk-wheel/
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.
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.
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.
This Orwellian building on Gorgie Road was an eyesore by day. Home to Edinburgh Council ministries, it was a depressing affair trudging past here every morning, the gruesome monument ruining my Fleetwood Mac U.S. Route 66 fantasies.
At night, though, it was gleaming, almost cosy and welcoming. Weird.
And it’s now being converted to yet more apartments. As is the rest of Edinburgh in its present ‘gentrification’ frenzy. Nostalgia will no doubt kick in one day and I’ll start to mourn the metamorphosis of Chesser House.
At this moment in time, though, I’m not bothered. I’ll give it a decade.
Further reading:
https://regencyresidential.co.uk/news/penthouse-plans-for-superflats-in-edinburgh/
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 