Tom Binnie

A busy day, starting with residents’ meeting in the square with three officials from the waste department. Danger danger aplenty. There are two camps - the long term residents, often in the housing association buildings, who remember the friendly slum it all was when they were kids, from a certain social strata shall we say, and the incomers with their apparently unfriendly snooty ways. The square has become shi-shi (extra). How to bridge such a divide? How to ride the two horses? Easier when there’s an external threat. And one arrived in the shape of the imperious M, who loftily declared without introduction, “I am a citizen from whom no services shall be removed!” But that was just very much her intro. Eyes rolling aplenty. And in the end we may just have a solution to the bins uplift that everyone agreed on.   
Then off to a funeral at Muiravonside. And not an unduly sad occasion; Tom was one hundred (father of one of my oldest friends) and we felt quite privileged to be there and share the event with his family. He was so like my Dad - the same stock, a lover of the democratic intellect, that peculiarly Scottish democratic intellect, dare I say, forged by a love of Burns and the teachings of the Kirk.  
Home to crop a huge amount of ivy and stuff some green sacks. Another trip to the dump booked. The summer rolls on.