Category Archives: Towns

Kirkcaldy Esplanade

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Splash

We went for a walk along the esplanade in Kirkcaldy today and as you can see it was high tide – in fact very high tide. The sea was coming right over the sea-wall, which is in desperate need of being renewed or at least patched up.

Whoever decided to pave the esplanade with brick paviors must be in need of a new brain. They are all being ripped up by the heavy waves and it makes it very dodgy underfoot.

Debris

We had to jump out of the way of the sea water and managed to miss being absolutely soaked, which is just as well because you really don’t want bits of the North Sea coming down on your head, thankfully the worst bit of debris which came in our direction was a plastic container which must have been tied to a boat at one point as the rope was still attached.

Saturation time

At the moment the weather is really calm with no high winds so the rough sea isn’t weather related, I think it’s something to do with the phase of the moon.

Prince William and Catherine at St Andrews

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It’s well known that William Wales and Catherine Middleton met each other when they were both students at the University of St Andrews and they were able to get on with their lives without intrusions so as a sort of thank you to the town they will be visiting on Friday 25th February.

This also happens to be the 600th Anniversary of the university and the Prince will be launching the celebrations. The town is abuzz with excitement!

Edinburgh again

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I thought that some more photos of Edinburgh might be of interest to people who haven’t been there. This first one is a back view of the Bank of Scotland HQ. We didn’t walk around to the front so I’ll leave that for another day.

This is a gardener’s cottage which is in the grounds of the Princes Street gardens just below Edinburgh Castle. I think that it isn’t far from looking like a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house.

This one as you can see is Fleshmarket Close grafitti and all, with the street sign above it. One of Ian Rankin’s books has this title. The close actually comes off Cockburn Street and the steps are very steep. There are lots of places like this in Edinburgh which is a very hilly city and you think that you’re never going to get to the top of the stairs.

And this is Arthur’s Seat, an extinct volcano. As you can see it’s just a stone’s throw from Princes Street and I’ve been assured that it’s a really easy walk up there, so we plan to do that during the Easter or summer holidays. It’s one of those things that we’ve put off for years as you do if you aren’t a tourist. We’ll have to pick a clear day for it so that I can get lots of good photos of the city, the River Forth and over to Fife.

Edinburgh

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The weekend turned out to be very busy for us and we even ended up having to go to Edinburgh on Sunday to take a coat back to a shop there. I’d left it too long to stick it in the post after ordering it on-line, I’ve never bought clothes that way before. Remind me not to do it again because it turned out to be nothing like I had expected it to look. Why are they so sparse with the descriptions?

Anyway, Sunday turned out to be a good day to go to the shops in Edinburgh because it wasn’t very busy at all and we were able to have a bit of a wander and take a lot of photographs. The street above is Cockburn Street (it’s pronounced Co-burn) which is usually very crowded with students and youngsters, but they were obviously all still in bed at this time. The photo doesn’t really give you the idea of how steep it is. It’s mentioned quite a lot in Ian Rankin’s books.

These ones are of The Royal Mile (High Street) – up and down, bin bags and all.

I like the fairy-tale quality of these very old buildings which are near the castle.

But if I won millions on the lottery I wouldn’t mind buying one of these Georgian ones in the New Town.

We had a look in the shops but didn’t buy anything, really if you’re looking for something in particular then you are unlikely to find it in Edinburgh. There are so few shops there because it’s tiny compared with Glasgow, which is the best place for shopping in Scotland.

South Bridge, Edinburgh, and Books

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It’s been ages since I had a mooch around a bookshop because there wasn’t any point in doing it due to the fact that I’m not supposed to be buying books until I whittle away at my unread book piles. But today, despite the horrible rain we just felt the need to get out of the house for a while and as I have loads of books that I really want to track down I thought – Edinburgh, Perth or St Andrews?

There’s flooding around the Perth area so we thought it best to give that a miss and as the weather forecast said that the rain was going to clear up in the afternoon around the Edinburgh area – we plumped for capital punishment!

The forecast was wrong and it rained all day plus it was very windy so we were buffeted going over the Forth Road Bridge – not nice. We decided to go to the South Bridge area for a change instead of our usual Stockbridge haunts. It wasn’t very successful, we must have been in about 7 book shops and charity shops and my haul was:

Behold, Here’s Poison – Georgette Heyer.
Duplicate Death – Georgette Heyer.
The Empty House – Rosamunde Pilcher.
Can You Forgive Her? – Anthony Trollope.

and my husband bought :
Ordinary Thunderstorms – William Boyd.

I’d been looking for Can You Forgive Her? because I wanted to read The Palliser series, and I thought that I’d better buy the Heyers in case I don’t see them again for ages. I really like Heyer’s detective novels because they’re very witty too, quite an unusual combination I think, and I’m on a Rosamunde Pilcher kick at the moment, this one is very short at only 182 pages, very unusual for her.

I was looking for books by Angela Thirkell, D.E. Stevenson, Janet Sandison, E.M. Delafield, Jane Duncan – all very retro but I haven’t read them before and much to my amazement they are being read now, I have to see what I’ve been missing!

Now that I’ve tried the shops and been unsuccessful I can order some on-line with an unblemished conscience because I always like to give my custom to small bookshops when I can. Plus it’s nice to have a poke around lots of books but none of the Edinburgh shops are anything like as good or crazy as Voltaire and Rousseau in Glasgow. It looks like you couldn’t possibly find anything you want amongst the piles, but I always do. Must get back there again soon.

After parking the car we had to walk past this hairdresser’s to get to the bookshops today. This place intrigues me because it’s such a throw-back to the 50s. It looks like nothing has ever been changed since then and I’ve never seen it open. What sort of hairdresser is closed on a Saturday afternoon? I know that you always think of Edinburgh for history and Glasgow for style, but I think they’ve taken this a bit far here. Who would use a place like this?

For all I know it might be a fantastic resource for the ladies of Edinburgh of a certain type. Stout tweed skirts, Fair-Isle jumpers and Lisle stockings. Not forgetting the blue rinses.

Anyone for a shampoo and set?!

Billy Connolly – I Wish I was in Glasgow

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I’ve been busy reading War and Peace, amongst other things and although there are loads of things that I want to do on ‘Pining’ – I just haven’t got the time at the moment.

So I thought I would have a quick look on You Tube to see what there was of Billy Connolly on it. I didn’t find what I was looking for but as I come from Glasgow, and it’s that very maudlin time of the year – for Scots anyway, I couldn’t resist this wee song.

If you’re homesick for Glasgow try not to greet into your porridge!

More Edinburgh

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From Rose Street we strolled down to Princes Street which was fairly mobbed but I managed to get a few photographs from there.

This is just the usual view of the castle. I suppose when you’ve seen something from an early age then it’s inevitable that you get blase about it. I was on an airport bus years ago coming back from Germany and there were tourists on the bus whose jaws actually dropped when they saw the castle in the middle of the city.

I like these buildings, I’m not even sure what they are but they always remind me of a German fairy tale. You can see them better when the trees have lost their leaves.

This one is of a part of the National Gallery of Scotland.

Then we walked back to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, taking the route through the city instead of the scenic way. The park land in front of the gallery has been landscaped by the American architect Charles Jencks and looks really lovely.

The autumn trees looked really beautiful reflected in the water.

A Day Out in Edinburgh

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Yesterday was one of those lovely crisp, blue sky autumn days so we took ourselves off to Edinburgh, parking the car at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. After a quick look at the exhibits we took the path by the Water of Leith which leads to Stockbridge again. It’s becoming a favourite walk with us and quite a few others, you can hardly believe that you are in the middle of a city. There are plenty of ducks but it’s the heron that always amazes me. I suppose it must get fish there but it’s amazing how patient it is.

This photograph is just a wee bit further on, you can see one of the massive supports of Dene Bridge to the right.

A bit further on again and you reach St Bernard’s Well which is mentioned in Frankenstein. It was a very popular place to ‘take the waters’ in Victorian times. I wonder how many survived it!

The usual stroll around the Stockbridge bookshops ended with me buying only two books. Both of them hardbacks, Hatter’s Castle by A.J. Cronin (to replace the paperback which I’m sure is in the house somewhere but I can’t find it) and another Rosamunde Pilcher one, Coming Home, which is pristine and cost me all of 99p. I know I’m not meant to be buying any more books and I had intended only buying Viragos or vintage crime but the people of Stockbridge are holding on to those ones themselves.

It’s only about a 10 or 15 minute walk from there to Rose Street and we thought we would go there and have a late lunch at The Black Rose which is a typical Scottish pub, bare floorboards but no sawdust nowadays! We took a bit of a chance as we hadn’t been there before but the food was fine. We didn’t sit outside though because we aren’t quite that mad. Joan in Pennsylvania, but now ‘pining’ for New England had a memorable holiday in Edinburgh some years ago, staying in a flat in Rose Street and I’m wondering if it has changed much since she was last here but I don’t think it’s easy to make out much from my photographs. It’s quite difficult to photograph Rose Street as it’s so narrow. Well, that’s my excuse!

Rose Street used to always be called ‘notorious’ in years past. Not only because it is full of drinking dens but there used to be a famous brothel there. So it was a popular destination for stag nights. Classy!

It has been pedestrianised and ‘tarted up’ – no pun intended, honest. And now there are small, high class jewellery shops and such as well as betting shops and bars.

Looking east.

Looking west.

There are a few mosaic stone roses laid into the paving on Rose Street. Here’s one.

There is an Art Deco type building halfway along Rose Street, the red sandstone one.

It seems to have been a John Menzies once. Maybe it was their headquarters.

There are a few more photographs of Edinburgh to come tomorrow.

Robinson Crusoe/Alexander Selkirk

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This is one of those books that I’ve been thinking about reading for absolutely years but I still haven’t got around to it. But I do wish that I had made a note of every book which I’ve ever read which mentions Robinson Crusoe in it. I’m sure it’s been name-checked in at least 5 of the books which I’ve read recently, it just keeps cropping up. Has anyone else noticed this? The detective in The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins was obsessed by Crusoe.

Anyway, Alexander Selkirk was the real life man whom Daniel Defoe based the story on and he came from the nearby fishing village of Lower Largo in Fife. This is the statue which they have of him as a memorial.

In the Wikipedia article it states that Selkirk asked to be put onto the island because he had doubts about the sea-worthiness of the ship that he was on, but the local version is somewhat different.

Apparently Alexander was a ‘greetin-faced nyaff’, in English that is a moaning, annoying, contemptible person. So the whole ship’s company couldn’t stand listening to him any longer and decided that they had to get rid of him, and deposited him on the uninhabited island of Mas a Tierra/Juan Fernandez, which is 400 miles west of Chile. This seems much more likely to me, especially since he ran off to sea in the first place because his unruly behaviour had got him into trouble locally when he was a youngster. A career as a privateer was obviously preferable to having to go before the kirk session and be punished. Nowadays the island is known as Robinson Crusoe’s Island.

As it happens, Selkirk was lucky not to be on his ship as it actually did sink with the loss of most of the crew and those who survived were thrown into a Chilean jail and left to rot there. You can read more about Selkirk’s life here.

I quite like the fact that it’s all very low key. No museum or anything, I don’t suppose there’s much that they could have in one anyway. It would amount to a map and a goat skin!