Black & White Memories

There's two stories to this so bear with me. The first is the straightforward one: I was over in the Members' bloc this afternoon & looked out of the 5th floor window into the back garden of a nearby tenement building. I'm one of those folk who really loves looking out of train windows into everyone's back garden so I was delighted to see this. The big building beyond it is the local primary school. So far, so ordinary & I was set to blip it in colour.

But then...when I was a very wee girl, before we went to Australia we lived for a while up the Royal Mile next door to my Gran. That was before the Royal Mile was a tourist attraction & my Gran could send me downstairs to buy her 5 Woodbine :-). It was also before I went to school & I used to sit at the livingroom window of the top floor tenement flat, watching children streaming down the road each morning with my mother reassuring me that yes, soon, one day, I would also be going to school, something I was desperate to do.

Well, the tenement flat has now gone and sadly so has my Mum but I realised...there's the school, still there, even if in the end its not the one I went to. And here I am, working right next door to it in a Parliament which could hardly have been imagined in those long ago years.

Its so long ago, it has to be in b&w.

so, I checked back & found the blip of where I lived in the Royal Mile when I was 4 years old. Its here.