A wander around Edinburgh with DivingDaughter

Back in the eighties I lived in Edinburgh for seven years but I'd never walked up Calton Hill. Yesterday I was visiting DivingDaughter who lives there now. We decided to have a look at Calton Hill. I hadn't realised there was so much open space up there. You only see a tiny bit of it all when looking up from Princes Street. Even on a dull day the views were good.

Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags
The Scottish Parliament building is behind the trees at left
The white blob is Our Dynamic Earth conference centre

The Forth estuary, the Isle of May and the "Kingdom of Fife"

Westerly towards the bridges across the Forth

Spaciousness on Calton Hill

I grew up in a small Lancashire Fylde town where change was on a comparatively small scale and felt 'manageable' to my adolescent brain. When visiting London with my family at the age of twelve (we swapped houses with a family my dad knew through his work as a teacher trainer, who wanted a seaside holiday; the Fylde coast is renowned for its seasidiness!) the constant signs of building and change there bothered me. I thought it messy, even ugly. Nowadays I feel a certain excitement when I witness the vitality of a city. It feels like a different 'life-form' from what I'm used to at home on a hill behind a small village in Argyll. Different but fine for all that. I guess it's human adaptability and social organisation that's impressing me now.

The bit of road beyond the hawthorn twigs in the foreground is Princes Street
Edinburgh Castle visible centre

We had hoped to eat lunch at Howies at the bottom when we walked down but it was packed and had a waiting time of about an hour so we wandered off in the direction of Surgeons' Hall and ate in a wee cafe beside it. Not before noticing a 'fruiting' muffin tree in a pot just outside though.

We were struck by the "unengagement" of the person who served us. She was perfectly polite but didn't 'connect', we felt. As DivingDaughter said: "You walked in with a yellow dry bag round your neck!" (it was to protect my camera from what we BoggyBrae-ers call "the falling damps" – not quite rain but not quite not rain either!). I don't think it's just a city thing, this 'unengagement' with customers (we said disengaged first but decided she'd have to have been engaged in the first place to be disengaged) because people 'engage' very readily in Glasgow. Anyway, it was just something we noticed. The soup was very good.

Surgeons' Hall, Edinburgh

After lunch DD found a wee internet cafe without the cafe where I could buy a "grippy" back for my phone. Then we wandered up to the Royal Mile and up to the castle. We just went in the free bits and the shop and then it was time for tea in The Elephant House, where J K Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. Very good tea (leaves that sink so that, although they give you a tea strainer, you don't really need it) and very good shortbread.

from the castle

I 'engaged' with these two on the train in the morning.
They were going to the 3rd birthday party of Red Face's nephew.
Red Face had a frog hood to put on when the make-up dried.