The only one I took

I’d meant to take a picture of a herring gull tearing at a black plastic rubbish bag near the Dean bridge but I was walking too fast. Then that fantastic reveal of the castle rock and garrison barracks above Princess Street Gardens as you emerge from Rose Street. But again I was walking too fast. At the next intersection it was just the sky seating for the Tatoo.

But I did enjoy the walk before the rain. Across Inverleith Park and up the Water of Leith to chug up to the Dean bridge and on to Princess Street and then by Charlotte Square and Butte House where Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon just seem hazy images in a misty rear view mirror. Up Rose Street, past Tisos that always seems to promise a blast of Cairngorm Plateau air ( although it was firmly closed). Then left by Fatface, the pawnshop, Fish and Game, the Farmers’ Market with a sour reek of paella, the park again with fellas scooping pond weed from the pond into a shiny black van that I’d thought first time round had maybe come to pick up a body.

Later it rained and I drove up to Craigleith to look for something at TK Maxx and to get something for tea with T later on and to shoot round Lidl.

When the rain stopped I walked across the park to look for books about Ireland. Nothing doing but I found a reprint of the account of the French climber who first scaled Annapurna in 1952 with an introduction by Jo Simpson. I bought it for the adventure and because I’d seen a house in West Cork on the market earlier in the day in which the details gushingly noted (sound the mystery gong) “the author of ‘Touching the Void’ had previously lived”. That author being none other than Jo Simpson.

Clutching at straws? Moi?

I sweated my way back to the flat with in addition a second hand short introduction to Augustine (his Confessions on Audible are requiring further of my limited attention although somehow disappointingly unexotic). Made tea - roast beef, roasters, a tired red cabbage, Yorkshires and a fruit salad. T and I watched some tennis in companionable, mesmeric silence as Alcaraz overcame his hard ball striking (Pat Cash) opponent - I’ll need to remind myself of his name although that shock mop of burnished orange hair is seared in my memory.

Another week starts tomorrow and better weather is forecast here and storms broadcast live to me by J from Florence presaged the arrival of a clout of cold air over Italy that is expected to push temps below 30c.

I shall be shaking the internet property tree with obsessive but impotent vigour whilst reflecting on the fact that there are 90 million empty new apartments in China.

I’m rereading Nicholas Mosley’s ( yes, the son of that Moseley)1990 classic experimental retelling of the European 20th century called ‘Hopeful Monsters’ which formed part of a series of novels he called ‘Catastrophe Practice’ - except we’re not practicing now and nor were for much of c20.

For the figure on empty apartments in China, (Ttchai-nahh as the Number One President would say) see the brilliant foreign affairs podcast, The Rachman Review, with Gideon Rachman of the FT ( the one with the German guy who lived in tchai-nahh for 35 years) available free on the FT website and also on Audible gratis.

It’s gotten late now and we are already into Monday. The herring gulls up on the roof occasionally fly bewailing through the dark. One yesterday made a frightful racket as a fox ran below a hedge looking nervously over its shoulder. Funnily, having never seen a fox in Edinburgh I saw another today dart across Inverleith Row in the full afternoon into the allotments. Another sign perhaps, pour moi, the straw clutcher.