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Merry Christmas
Western Harbour, Edinburgh, 23 December 2019. Click for more.

25 December 2019

Around Town

I’m scanning a lot of old photos at the moment because my photo-taking has slowed down during everyday life at home, but here are a handful from around Edinburgh this month.

30 November 2019

After hanging onto an 8GB iPhone 4 way beyond the point of practicality, I finally have a new one (a 256GB iPhone 7, only a few years behind the curve), which means I can finally take properly decent photos when I’m out without a camera—like the sunsets over the Meadows on my ride home from work at this time of year.

Susnet over the Meadows, Edinburgh

25 October 2019

Of No Effect

Given the sweeping under the carpet of Leave campaign irregularities by UK authorities in recent days, I feared the worst yesterday, and feared that a ruling in the government’s favour would open the door to the neutering of British parliamentary democracy. So it was an unexpected relief to hear the unanimous conclusion of eleven Supreme Court judges that Johnson’s prorogation was “unlawful, null and of no effect”. Parliamentary democracy lives, and parliament itself returned today to try to head off the looming disaster that Johnson seems determined to bring down upon us.

Read More · 25 September 2019

Local Views

Last year I finally started doing justice to a large backlog of photographs intended for Detail, chipping away at sorting, resizing and arranging them into galleries. I’m now near the end of that process, with only a couple more to go. Here are some featuring my everyday surrounds, with photos taken in and around Edinburgh.

Read More · 25 June 2019

Rust in Peace

We lived in Edinburgh for nine years without a car, but when our son came along the merits of having one again became hard to resist, so in June 2010 we bought a second-hand 2002 Ford Focus.

Read More · 17 June 2019

Marking Time

Marking season is always hard, and this blog always suffers during it, because posting here when I should be marking looks bad—not that avoiding posting here makes things any easier. This year it’s been unexpectedly extended by the death of my home computer’s hard drive, in painful stages over about five days. I’ve had some serious incidents with computers before, but nothing that posed such an existential threat to thirty years of accumulated computer files. Fortunately, I had a current back-up, which I’m now handling with extreme care, and have backed up in turn. The iMac should return with a new SSD and hard drive next week, and things can get back to normal.

Which all meant that I lost a week of marking time, and am now scrambling to catch up. But something happened yesterday which prompted a dashed-off comment elsewhere that I want to add here as well, so I’m going to pause for a moment to post it before getting back to the feedback forms. Other backlogged post plans still have to wait.

17 May 2019

Manchester

At the beginning of last month my family and I caught the train down to Manchester for the weekend, to have a look around its vibrant mix of old and new buildings and attend some special events, like the CBBC tour at MediaCityUK and a Day of Percussion at the Royal Northern College of Music. My son and I had been to Manchester before, but spent all of that trip looking at much smaller buildings, so this was effectively a first proper visit to the city itself. There was a good Martin Parr exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery; we saw Stephenson’s Rocket and the world’s first railway station at the Science and Industry Museum; and I finally got to see the Daniel Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North from the inside. I liked it all. Still didn’t manage a curry on Rusholme Street, though.

Here’s the compulsory gallery for Detail, this time posted within a month rather than after 1+ years. (With a few extra photos from last visit which have sat on my hard drive for seven, ahem.)

8 March 2019

←Journal in 2018