Spring time in Scotland

It's, Scotland, it's Easter, it's spring time... So, plenty of snow then... Walking in the Pentlands today, snow left from the dreadful weather earlier this week which dumped snow over a lot of Scotland and storms that have made a mess of a lot of bits of the coastline. Some of it has melted away but in the Pentlands on the edge of Edinburgh it's still lying there, from light dusting on some spots to seriously deep snow in other spots, coming up our shins almost to our knees.







Walking up the hill the skyline gave a great effect, making it look like the clouds were rising up from below the horizon:










Walking through snow is tiring, time for a breather; this also means time for Bruce the dog to scrounge a biccie from his master:






You can see Edinburgh spread out in the background here (click for the larger version on Flickr):

Botanical

I'm enjoying some time off and lo and behold the grim, gray weather of the weekend vanished to be replaced by gloriously sunny, spring-like weather (although still pretty cool, if not actually frosty in the shade). Good lord, good weather on a week off? Gasp. And it's that beautiful, golden quality of sunlight at this time of year, not the brighter, bleaching sunlight of summer (well, when we get sun in summer in Scotland...) while the air still has that clear quality from winter, a combination which is especially good for taking photos, I find, especially of some buildings. Yesterday the sunlight was complimented by a wonderfully clear sky, like a blue crystal dome, utterly cloudless, as I decided to head down to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Despite the fact I have lived in the city since the start of the 90s I've rarely been down to the Botanics, mostly because it's never really been near where I lived or worked, nor is it close to any friend's home I might be going to or any other place I might be visiting.








I ended up spending hours walking through the greenhouses, from the lovely original Palm House (above), which dates from 1834 and is a splendid example of the glass, iron and steel construction the Victorian period pioneered so spectacularly. Still gorgeous today - especially on a bright day - but imagine how much more impressive this structure must have appeared to the Edinburgh citizens of the 1830s, who lived in a city of tall, impressive stone buildings.In the Old Town towering stone tenements used the limited space effectively but also make for shadowed canyons; even the New Town with its Georgian splendour and much larger windows and wider streets still would not have this quality, a space flooded with huge amounts of natural light sparkling through glass suspended from a seemingly frail - but actually very strong - slim latticework of iron. Being midweek it was fairly quiet and I often had entire glasshouses to myself and it was delightfully peaceful.



















I shot far too many photos as I toured through the various public glasshouses (there are others which are for research) from the Palm House through tropics and arid biospheres; I've only uploaded a few so far and will do the rest later, although I also shot a brief video in each of the glasshouses as I went through them and I've edited them together into a 'virtual tour':

Poetry in motion

I've been on a bit of a poetry kick this month; Edinburgh City of Literature's annual campaign this year (previous years have seen Conan Doyle and Stevenson used to boost interest in reading) is in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library. Carry a Poem is encouraging people to find ways of taking poetry around with them and sharing it; as well as giveaways of books and cards it also includes projecting verse onto public monuments and buildings, such as the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge (an institution which, coincidentally, digitally archives this very blog):







I love this idea; in our northern kingdom night falls very early in the winter months and I think it is rather wonderful that as darkness steals across the land the very fabric of the city becomes a page for the poet's art. For an ancient city such as Edinburgh it seems most appropriate; it's a city of history and culture, part real, solid buildings and streets, part fantastical, drawn from the imagination of painters and writers and photographers and others and the written word is as much Edinburgh's foundational fabric as her native stone and volcanic rock, from scholarly treatises penned by kings to the centuries of endless writers who have lived and scribed away inside her, their words shaped by the city but also shaping the city itself, re-imagining it, be it Burns or Stevenson or Hume or modern authors like Rankin. Even her streets have become pages, home to the written word:







How sad then that so many people walked past as I stopped to look at these scenes, words written in light and displayed on ancient stone, most of them oblivious to these little gems of art and life the city was offering up to them as they hurried home after the day's labour. Even when these schemes are not running there's so much that draws the eye, little stories beckon, little glimpses of history and lives and small delights and wonders if you but pause for just a moment. Look, here carved in stone it tells you Scott once lived in this building, that Stevenson drank in this howff. Sometimes my walk home may take ten minutes longer than usual as I pause to look at something (and usually try to photograph it too), but what's ten minutes? Who cares if it's home ten minutes later when those moment were spent not in the dull, mundane every day of work, home, dinner, washing up but in looking at something beautiful that most people are too blinkered to notice, a tiny splash of magic that made me smile.



Their loss. The city speaks if you have eyes to see and ears to hear and you haven't closed off that sense of wonder that first is stoked in childhood but so many seal off in adulthood, letting it atrophy, assuming it a childish thing and always left afterwards with a tug somewhere inside for something they know they have lost but they don't know what it is let alone how to recover it. Pity such people; they like to project an aura of being capable, practical, down to earth; often they affect to pity the dreamer as one who is a little addled perhaps or merely too indulgent, even childish. But they are the ones who are hollow within, closed, lost, stumbling through the world with their most important senses blinded to the wonder around them.



I think it's why I love poetry; it's like jazz, it stands outside of prose, although kin to it, it touches directly on sensation, experience, emotions in a way no other artform does, although many borrow from it for their own medium, which becomes richer for it. Poetry is one of our most ancient artforms - long before we wrote them down they were told orally (still the best way to experience a poem) and passed on, from the short to the truly epic, the longer ones memorised in verse because it helped the cadences of the storytelling and for the storyteller to recall it for their audience. Words, especially the written word, were seen by the ancients as being akin to magic, a symbolic way of interpreting and reworking some part of the universe. They were right. Since I'm on a poetry jag, here's a lovely little animation by Julian Grey I found which accompanies former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins reading his poem Forgetfulness:

Forgetfulness - Amazing Animated Poetry. @ Yahoo! Video

sunset

This afternoon, down where the River Esk flows out into the mighty Firth of Forth in Musselburgh, looking back across a very swollen high tide towards Edinburgh and the hills as the sun set behind the city and turned the world copper.







Funny, but although I've been on the beach on the opposite bank many times I hadn't been to this spot - just near the race course, behind the some houses, where there's a bit of a peninsula made from the clinker and ash from the nearby power station. And for some reason right next to the junction of the two rivers there's this giant blue arrow in a small park. Why? Turns out that it was originally put there right next to the river to let RAF bomber crews line up for their bombing run on a floating target out on the Forth. I had no idea this was here.

Brrrsville!

Walking along the gorge of the River Almond by the weir and ruined old mill by Cramond, big chunks of ice floating in the river, large, flat sheets which the ducks were using to sit on, and huge rows of icicles hanging down from the overhanging rocks like enormous fangs. Couldn't resist taking some pics and shooting a brief video 360; the roar of water over the weir and the current in the river below it were both very strong, presumably with some of the snow and ice melting into it (going to be a lot more of that over the UK when the cold snap actually lifts properly). The temperature was actually slightly better during the daylight hours today than it's been recently, but on the banks of the nearby Forth the ferocious wind felt like it was straight from the Arctic. Still, at least it was good for the kite surfers who were having fun when we passed along the windswept and still icy prom.

Stormy weather

Down to Portobello this afternoon with my mate and his dog to let him have a run around off the leash on the beach (the dog, not my friend), only to find what was a cold wind in the city centre of Edinburgh was a howling gale coming right off the North Sea at Porty, whipping the waves up into big foaming gray peaks and slamming right into the sea wall so hard they splashed right up the side, across the Esplanade and hit the wall of the structure on the other side. That was when we decided to walk around the block at the worst bit :-) Pictures are a bit fuzzy, the wind was so high my camera lens, glasses and my face were all getting whipped by flying sand granules and salt spray, had to clean them repeatedly but within minutes they just got covered with a film of it again.

Christmas greetings from Scotland

After finishing work for the year I walked up a very snowy Royal Mile to the Castle gates. For the first time ever I had it all to myself, not another soul there for ten minutes, just me standing in snow that came over the toes of my boots, that soft scrunching sound that reminds you instantly of childhood playtimes in the snow. Just me and the cold and the snow and the Castle glowing in the night above the city, dusted with snow like icing on a historical cake. Below and around me views across the whole of Edinburgh, right out to the Pentland Hills. Freezing but incomparably beautiful. Merry Christmas from a snowy Scotland!

Snowy Edinburgh

On the way home this evening after the last book group of the year and a nice drink, passing Princes Street Gardens, the Christmas lights, snow, Edinburgh Castle... This is my view on the way home and one of the reasons I love living here in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet.

Happy Saint Andrew's Day

Its November 30th, Saint Andrew's Day here in Scotland; Edinburgh Castle and several other monuments have been specially illuminated with blue lights to recall the Saltire for the occasion. The mist descended theatrically when I was shooting this adding a nice, spectral haze to it all.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

"Do not despair

For Johnny-head-in-air;

He sleeps as sound

As Johnny underground.




Fetch out no shroud

For Johnny-in-the-cloud;

And keep your tears

For him in after years.




Better by far

For Johnny-the-bright-star,

To keep your head,

And see his children fed."

For Johnny, written by John Pudney on the back of an envelope as the bombs fell on London in 1941.







The Remembrance Garden in Princes Street Gardens, right in the shadow of the Scott Monument; in the background were some anti-war protesters, although I should say they were quiet and not at all disrespectful; in fact I saw some talking to some old veterans. I don't think they had anything against the soldiers or those paying respects to the fallen, just against the concept of war, and its hard to disagree with that.










Some of the markers in the Remembrance Garden are plain, many have names or regiments or ships or squadrons marked on them. This one touched me the most - it simply read "to dad". I have no idea if the dad in question fell in one of the recent conflicts or half a century ago; I doubt it matters, the pain and loss and grief will still hurt as much.






This one was marked to 'Uncle Alex' on HMS Hood; the Hood was a famous, huge Royal Navy battlecruiser. During a duel with the German pocket battleship Bismarck she was completely destroyed; its thought a lucky hit penetrated the weaker upper deck armour and set off a magazine. She exploded and sank almost instantly taking hundreds and hundreds of men with her to the bottom of the ocean; only three sailors from this enormous ship survived. Some say one of her turrets fired a last salvo as she sank. The comedic actor and former Doctor Who Jon Pertwee also served on the Hood and had transferred off her just shortly before the battle to train as a chief petty officer, or he may never have lived to become a famous entertainer.







Not just historical battles remembered here but also the here and now as someone marks a cross for the men and women serving in Afghanistan right now.

fire juggling

Now that the clocks have gone back to GMT its fully dark by the time I leave work. Coming home one evening when it was unusually mild (and dry!) I decided on a whim to take a different route and walk up the Royal Mile, digging my camera out of my bag thinking I may get a couple of street night shots; in a slice of pure lucky chance I happened on a fire juggler on the cobbled pedestrianised section of street outside the Fringe office. Obviously I've seen and taken plenty of pics of jugglers chucking around all sorts of things from knives to firesticks around this spot during the Festival, but not usually this late in the year and at night; certainly made the use of fire look far more dramatic being dark!








Of course as I was walking home from work I didn't have the tripod with me, so I had to make do; to be honest I think half the many night shots I have on my Flickr are improvised, spur of the moment affairs rather than done when I've gone out deliberately with the tripod to do some night work. One of the advantages of digital is you are willing to take chances improving a shot since you're not wasting money and film if it doesn't work. And in this case since he was moving around and the fiery ropes he was holding were also swirling around I doubt a tripod would have made much difference here, he and they would still be streaked and blurred, but even so its worth taking the shot for the subject even if the pic isn't as sharp as I'd normally try for; as Lee Harvey Oswald once said, sometimes you just have to take the shot. And its fun when the city offers up a little surprise like this; if I had gone home my normal route I'd never have seen this, it was just a sudden whim to go this way.

Easy rider

At last, the answer to the age old problem of sore saddle arse:

blowing your own trumpet

In early to work, out late so a little narked; beautiful, golden autumn evening outside so decide to enjoy slow walk home, wander up the Royal Mile, camera in hand, coming across this bloke playing some jazz on his trumpet. Nice autumn evening, cool breeze, cool jazz, nice. Put some coins in his instrument case, took a couple of pics then just settled nearby to listen for a few minutes and enjoy it.

Autumn in Edinburgh

Its Edinburgh, its autumn, its beautiful...







As I was walking through the New Town with dad for Doors Open Day we looked up Castle Street and saw two jet contrails describing a huge Saint Andrew's Cross in the sky above Edinburgh Castle. Legend has it that a vision in the sky before a battle 1100 years ago is the reason that the Saltire came to be the national emblem of Scotland (and one of the oldest national symbols in the world, I believe), so there was something especially magical about seeing this accidental creation above one of the great symbols of Scotland. Few minutes later or from a different vantage point and we'd not have seen this special view.

reflections

Walking along the Union Canal near the old brewery, some new buildings I've seen being constructed over the last year. Wasn't sure if they were small offices or going to be homes, but I've been told they are a modern version of town houses, although it looks like they have completed them just in time for them to lie mostly empty as no-one can get the mortgage to buy them. I walk this way quite a lot and I've shot this in colour and not really cared much for the resulting pics, but shooting in black and white (and my B&W shots are shot properly in B&W, not colour then greyscaled afterwards on Photoshop, it makes a difference) I was much more satisfied with the result.





(click for the bigger version on the Woolamaloo Flickr)

Even Hitler hates the trams

Some wag has reworked the subtitles on Downfall so now Hitler is ranting about the fucking awful tram line which is being imposed on Edinburgh (no referendum to ask the people like they did with the proposed congestion charge, but then the people voted against the politicians wishes and told them to shove that up their arses, so now they don't give us referendums before ruining the city in case we tell them what they don't want to hear. Democracy in action). Its a huge, multi million pound white elephant already running late and over budget and pretty useless since it is just one line which doesn't go near where about 3/4 of the resident actually live, which makes it pretty useless as a transit system - I live fairly centrally and work centrally yet I can't even use it when finished to go to work.

Mark Millar at the Edinburgh Book Festival

Over the holiday weekend I was lucky enough to attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival once again, this time to see top Scottish comics scribe Mark Millar on what I think was his first appearance at this venerable literary bash. I bumped into Mark outside the Writer’s Yurt just before the event was about to start and he seemed pretty happy to be there, smiling and clearly enjoying the idea of being there. This enthusiasm was also evident during the actual event where Mark delighted the packed audience, discussing his comics and film work with much (and often self-effacing) humour before Scotland on Sunday’s books editor Stuart Kelly, who was chairing the event, opened proceedings up for the audience to ask some questions (including, as it turned out, an old friend of Mark’s from Glasgow’s well-loved AKA Comics).

Stuart introduced Mark, inviting him to discuss his earlier work and how he got into comics, with that well-proven path into comicdom for many a British writer, 2000 AD, which Mark was quite honest and candid about, talking about how he was obviously pleased when Tharg’s minions gave him his chance but saying that looking back he thinks he simply wasn’t quite ready at that stage and his writing wasn’t up to par, so there was an element of learning on the job. Naturally the subject of the notorious Big Dave strip for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic reared its beer-swilling head, the series he co-created with Grant Morrison and Steve Parkhouse and which still divides 2000 AD readers. Mark also paid tribute to Warren Ellis and getting noticed in the US comics market when he was given the writing gig for The Authority following Warren’s run.

(Mark and supporting wine glasses signing for fans after the event at the Book Festival, click for the bigger pic on Flickr)

Stuart, who is a self-confessed comics lover, clearly knew his stuff and asked Mark about a variety of his work, taking us from 2000 AD and the Authority to childhood dream come true of working on some of the biggest comics characters around like the Superman and the Avengers and, of course, re-interpreting and reworking classic Marvel characters to such acclaim with the Ultimates and discussing Mark’s penchant for happily subverting established rules and clichés of the medium (which is, of course, one of the reasons we love him) and then on to creator-owned works such as American Jesus and Kick-Ass.

Graphic novels are, as we all know, now pretty damned big business in Hollywood and its no surprised that one of the medium’s best-known writers would be involved in this comics-celluloid crossover. However, as with much of his comics work Mark’s achieved this in his own style and he was refreshingly straightforward with the audience - it seems unlikely that the glamour of Tinsel Town or huge box office success is going to swell the head of the boy from Coatbridge. In fact it seemed quite the contrary - he was obviously delighted with the success he was enjoying in Hollywood, but he made it quite clear that at the end of the day his main occupation is a comics writer, although as he admitted laughingly, he had always wanted to write a superhero film since he was a kid after seeing the 70s Superman movie and deciding as a boy that he should be the one to write a sequel! Which prompted Stuart to ask him about the Superman movie he was almost involved in more recently, asking what his version would have been like. Laughter erupted as Mark explained he couldn’t tell us about that script idea unless we wrote him a very large cheque. Would he still like to write a Superman film? Oh yes!

(a page from Mark Millar and John Romita Jr's Kick-Ass, published Marvel Icon)

Obviously Wanted came up - a serious box office success although it was considerably different from Mark’s original comics. When Stuart asked him how he felt about the differences he explained he didn’t mind, in fact he said he quite enjoyed the film version; the version he wrote worked perfectly as a comic, eh thought, but not necessarily as a film, so he had no big problem with changing concepts to suit a different medium and besides, he laughed, he loved some additions in the film version, like the loom (super-assassins knitting, what a great idea he commented).

Naturally the film version of Kick-Ass was discussed and the way studios were interested in the property but only if they could change elements they were worried about. Mark had nothing but praise for director Matthew Vaughan (Stardust, Layer Cake and the film version of American Jesus) who agreed with him that they wanted to go with the story from the comics, not some watered-down-by-studio-committee version (which would doubtless excise many of the controversial elements that are central to the concept) and set about talking to contacts to raise their own finance to do the film their way (an approach recently vindicated by the excited studios bidding for distribution rights to the completed film after footage screened at San Diego Comic Con to much excitement), as well as complimenting Jane Goldman’s script-writing ability. He also promises us that what we'll see on screen is taken directly from the comic original.

All in all it was a cracking event, with a packed and very happy looking audience (including Ian Rankin and his son who is a big comics fan) clearly enjoying the evening discussing Mark’s comics and film work (not to mention briefly mentioning an idea he has been floating to Scottish Television for a possible show set in Scotland, which I’m sure we will hear more about further down the line) and it seemed to me that Mark was seriously enjoying himself talking to a home-country audience about comics at the Festival, carrying on his talk on a more individual level with a line of fans who waited patiently to speak to him while getting their books signed afterwards. As this year’s Book Festival draws to a close in Edinburgh I have to say that evening rounded it off very nicely for the comics fans.

Framed

She's been framed :-)











For some reason this just seemed like one of these street shots that worked better in monochrome. I don't know why, but some pics just work better in black and white.

Nocturnal cycling piano player

A couple of evenings ago I was drinking in the city's Grassmarket, an area I rarely drink in these days - its mostly tourists and first year students who go there - but I was meeting some friends who have been working abroad and arranged to meet several folks there. The whole square has been done up recently to make it more open; if you don't know the city its a square behind and below the imposing bulk of Edinburgh Castle in the Old Town, one side lined with pubs and inns, some of which are very old (going back to the 1500s), some of which, when they were actual coaching inns, played host to Robert Burns on visits to Edinburgh. And as we sat outside on a warm evening we heard music. Not unusual in a public square, especially during the Edinburgh Festival. And we all turn to see where it is coming from and we see a man in evening dress and top hat cycling his piano through the Grassmarket as he plays. When I told other people of this the next day I got the 'oh, Joe's off on one of his magical fantasy land tales again' looks, but I have documentary evidence:







I must apologise for the low quality of the pics, but shooting freehand (not that a tripod would have helped if I had it since he was moving most of the time) in a dark square at night is never going to give crisp, clear pics and the flash wasn't much use in that situation either. But I had to try and grab some pics because even in Festival time Edinburgh you just don't see a man cycling a piano through the city streets at night all that often. It was all wonderfully eccentric and delightful and magical and I loved it. Little bizarre delights like this that the city sometimes just throws up to you are part of what makes life fun. And here's a very short video clip - its brief and even darker than the still pics, very murky night-time streets (and far away from the street lamps) but it was the best I could do on the spot to give you a tiny taste of this piano moving through the streets as he played:

"Check yer baws!"

In a window festooned with men's health advice, specifically about checking the old undercarriage regularly to detect early onset of testicular cancer, on Cockburn Street I see this cartoon image - yes, it is indeed a giant, hairy bollock encouraging men to check themselves by declaring "check yer baws!" (a literal take on the old phrase 'talking bollocks'). Cracked me up, much to the bemusement of some passing Spanish tourists who not knowing Scots didn't understand what I was laughing my arse off about; once I stopped giggling I had to take a quick snap. Apologies for the reflection, no way to really avoid them; for film fact fans the street side reflected in the window is the side where Sophia Myles' character lives in the film version of Hallam Foe: