Skip to main content

Settling In

By zsstevens
It's now eighteen months since we settled in Edinburgh after a couple of delightful decades in rural Banffshire.

Having never lived in a city, we viewed the move with caution and a degree of planning.

The car sits relatively idle in residents' parking in our street. It did only about 2,000 miles between its 2021 and 2022 MoT checks. With the nearest Edinburgh City Car Club pickup point just round the corner, I have only to persuade herself that a further conversion of lifestyle would make sense.

The garden flat in which we now live suits us fine. Quite a substantial downsize has meant a clear-out of much impedimenta from 50+ years of marriage. And for the first time, we live permanently together. Big changes.

With the time to pursue what has been a hobby since the 1960s - genealogical research - that is precisely what has moved centre stage in my daily activities. Enrolment in an MSc course at the University of Strathclyde.

Edinburgh is a large village, and on my daily walk, I will meet people I know or who know me about half the time. In 2022 I walked 1,321 miles and currently average about five a day.

It is also a city of societies and lectures. One need never be bored. So in Edinburgh, I am now
And I attend most meetings, in my capacity as an ordinary member, of my local Branch of the SNP.

Comments

  1. Iain Old7 September 2023 at 02:33

    Great to hear you are enjoying Edinburgh. I think I may have seen you this evening at the Queen's Hall?
    Also great to hear you have enrolled for the MSc in Genealogical Studies at Strathclyde University - I have done their two excellent online courses on Futurelearn and also attended the recent online launch of the new Institute for Genealogical Studies.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Your comments will be read before adding to the blog.

Abuse, illegality or comment at odds with prevailing medical advice will be excluded.

Popular posts from this blog

101 Primer for being video-online: Part 2 - Presentation

By zsstevens
Yesterday I wrote about preparing to go "on-air". Today, it's Lights, Camera, Action. In a professional TV studio, an illuminated sign "On-Air" will switch on above the door to warn people to keep quiet and be aware that cameras are broadcasting. Many things happen behind the camera that the public does not see. I have sat in the corner of the BBC's Reporting Scotland studio playing pontoon with some of the stage-hands while Sally Magnusson read the news. And rescued a cameraman who, in his enthusiasm to obey the producer's instruction to reposition his camera, got his leg tangled in the cables, tripped and fell forward with the camera a mere six feet in front of Kirsty Wark who was speaking to an adjacent camera. I saw it coming and had dashed forward and caught him, and his camera, just before he hit the floor. Risks in a home studio are less extensive and more banal. For example, The First Minister's daily press briefing yester...
Post a Comment
Read more

A dying King

By zsstevens
Yesterday was not a good day, diary-writing wise. Quite properly, it is a task that has to take second place to preparation for meetings, discussions about my future activities and the concerns raised by constituents. So I was very late and very rushed. The most difficult aspect of writing is writing right. All the electronic assistants to writing, I type into app.grammarly.com which is pretty good at highlighting as I type; mis-spellings, poor grammar, infelicitous phrasing, bad punctuation. It can even if you subscribe, do a plagiarism check. But it cannot catch every attempt a tired and inattentive brain will make to mangle ideas before they pass via the keyboard into the resulting diary. I try to proofread my words after they are written. Re-reading one's words in the form they were written is difficult, very difficult. The author reads what the author thinks they had written, not what is actually "on the page". So a means of mentally resetting one's percep...
Post a Comment
Read more

Re-calibrating life

By zsstevens
As a measure of our creeping away from most restrictive aspects of this pandemic lockdown, we had our first proper fish supper at the end of this week. Rockfish in Whitehills has adapted its layout to create a one-way system which allows 2-metre social distancing. They used to have 38 seats for eating-in customers. For the time being they're gone. They have always taken telephone orders and that now enables them to book you in for a specific time; in our case 1830. And on arrival, the order of two portions of lemon sole and one portion of chips awaited collection; fresh and hot. Herself who had placed the order had not specified the enclosure for the fish. So they were battered rather than breaded as I might have specified. But it's a lovely light batter. Looking at the kitchen orders behind the staff, it was clear that they were in for a fairly busy evening. This fine establishment says on their web site ( http://rockfishwhitehills.co.uk/ ) that: "Our family has ove...
Post a Comment
Read more