This semi-pagan fire ceremony attracted 15-20,000 people depending on which report you read. It certainly looked impressive with the trail of fire coming down the Mound, along Princes St and up onto Calton Hill. Once there, some (not very intimidating) Vikings lit a fire, shaped as the Lion Rampant. Then, to the strains of Highland Cathedral, the most spectacular fireworks show began.
Next evening, was the picking-up-the-tickets fiasco. Let it be said that to muck up this grandly takes a degree of genius. Three ticket slots servicing many thousand people takes a while. I'd sauntered up early evening and just as well I did, as they shut the queue not many yards behind me. The (dis)organisers expect a large proportion of the 100,000 people planned at the Street Party, lots of whom just arrived in the country yesterday, to pick up their tickets but only provide three people to serve them!!!!!!!!! And these guests to Edinburgh have to freeze in the cold for hours with no option if they want their already booked and paid for tickets.OK, I could have been far more organised and booked tickets early enough that they were sent out to me, but I didn't. Not everyone wants to be locked into plans that early. But I expect a sensible service.
.JPG)
This pic is from when I was standing in the very long queue in sub-zero temps doing my flu no good. It is of the BofS HQ on the Mound with risky fairground rides outside it instead of the arrogant risky business usually performed inside.
Of course, the human spirit perks up in these situations, and there was a very sweet moment when the friend of the shivering German in front of me arrived with his pal's 'tea' in tupperware and took the heavy bags off his shoulders and nearly fed the poor soul to keep him going. Awww!
Sig Other and I fortunately, had fortified ourselves with leek, potato and yellow split pea soup, followed by honeyed rice pudding and blueberry compote, but even that amount of starch couldn't keep the cold out for the whole three hours.
I won't forget this and can confidently predict I'll be moaning about it for months. I just won't tell my mother how long I stood in the cold. Perhaps, I'll have calmed down enough to enjoy myself tonight, but the end of the year is as good a time to have a rant as any. If I were the resolution-making type, I could resolve not to rant so much, but that wouldn't last far past the Bells!
In the meantime, Sig Other is being subjected to Scottish traditions and my haphazard explanations of why things are done the way they are at Hogmanay. I think he got a bit fed up when I pointed out steak pies in Sainsbury's earlier today - apparently he knew what they were, even though they don't have them where he comes from.
Daughter, longsufferingly accepted the text of the New Year joke I texted her. This is something that my father used to tell us each New Year, but he remembered it properly, whereas, with each passing year I forget bits of it. It no longer makes any sense, so I can't repeat it here!
The image is a bit weird as (quite naturally) these are protected and not to be downloaded from her website, but I thought I'd try!
The quotes below are from a deconstruction of the painting.
Above is a Swynnerton painting I do like.
These two maps are from this site:
Above is a view of the High Atlas mountains in Morocco which I visited on holiday a couple of years ago. I've not been to the hilly part of Scandanavia or the Appalachians, but I imagine those are just as different from the Grampians as the picture above.
Taken by the Terrain Mapping camera (TMC) on board the Chandrayaan-1, the first Indian unpersoned space mission to the moon. Chandrayaan-1 means ‘moon craft’ and is orbiting the moon at a distance of 110km.
*This was a learning point for me as previously I had only come across this term in the scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail when King Arthur approaches the peasants who turn on him with blandishments about democracy claiming to be an anarchist syndicalist grouping. I had to investigate this, and found the website listed below. I will make time soon to look at this further.
Oops! Having basked in the warmth of the belief that I am apart from such concerns, I scrolled further down the egg coddler site to find that I am in possession of an (almost) proscribed kitchen implement.
Apparently to call these objects egg coddlers is “pushing the envelope too much”. However, I feel quite unabashed at being judged by someone willing to use such a trite cliché. My perfectly adequate excuse is that my mother bought a set of these plastic implements and deciding that her life was too short to microwave eggs, foisted them off onto me. I suspect they still languish all but forgotten in a cupboard in my kitchen.
This was the first time I’ve ever walked along as far west as this, even though I’ve been going to Portobello all my life. My great grandfather had a large house near the beach and I was taken there for short holidays from birth. There are tatty old photographs of me shivering in the paddling pool and chasing great grandfather’s old Boxer dog in the large walled garden at the back of his house. 