Incident

A busy but stimulating day. Well, after a slow start, which involved attending a meeting in person for the first time in more than 18 months. I guess it felt strange, but in other respects it was a time sink. I was hoping to walk in, but although a little better my foot wasn’t quite up to an early morning sprint to the Business School. So bus it (mainly) was.

Afterwards, I headed over to meet Mr A outside ECA, which now hosts the Book Festival, to attend a really interesting event with Alison Watt and Andrew O’Hagan, mainly on the topic of her new exhibition. Part of what made the event so interesting was the obvious empathy between the two participants, interviewer and interviewee. This is a reminder to myself to make sure we get to that exhibition, as well as getting to see the Galloway Hoard before it disappears from the National Museum. Today’s event, coupled with the concerts we’ve seen in the last few days, really reinforced to me how lucky we are to live in Edinburgh.

Talking of the National Museum, we were heading back to Chambers Street afterwards for me to pick up some lunch and Mr A to get a bus home, when we encountered this scene, which is the aftermath of the fire early this morning which damaged two of the cafes along George IV Bridge. At that point, the fire was still being attended by a lot of fire appliances, and quite a few other emergency service vehicles and personnel. We had to divert via South College Street, to get where we wanted to get. When I came out of the office onto Chambers Street much later, it still appeared to be closed to through traffic, and most of the other roads in the vicinity were more or less gridlocked. However, luckily as the foot has felt progressively better as the day went on, I was able to walk all the way home, which was just as well as the buses seemed to be going nowhere.

Other than the Book Festival event, I also had a nice chat with a professional services colleague I hadn’t met before, with whom I will be working closely for the next few months, and also had another of my Latin American tour ‘events’/zooms, which was very interesting indeed.

Home to baked sea bass with Mr A.