No pictures, I’m afraid, as it appeared too suddenly!

On Sunday we got along to the last day of the Paul Sandby exhibition at the National Gallery. He was an early, influential watercolourist, who also worked on mapping projects, etc. with his brother in the aftermath of Cullodon. He really didn’t like Hogarth and started his career with a series of parodies of his famous cartoons before building a reputation for more serious stuff!
A light lunch in their restaurant followed.

After this we paid a brief visit to Madeleine’s studio down in Leith and then decided to walk upstream to Canonmills, which would be a fair step for M, with her sticks!
Approaching Canonmills I saw a heron which had just taken off slowly gaining height and flying straight towards us down the river! It passed us by only a couple of yards away as we stood just to the side of it’s intended flightpath. Wonderful close up views as it flew by close enough to touch it’s wing!

After that we had to sit down! We chose a newish coffeee shop called Moo, which, it turned out, served a very nice slice of blueberry gateau! Yum!

Just around the corner M. bumped into one of her dad’s old friends and we spent a few minutes catching up…
After that, time for a bus home!

Last week we went to see Moon.

We both really liked it and I think it’s one of the better sf films I’ve seen for quite some time! And the best movie featuring clones I’ve seen at all!

Beforehand, we had tried out a very new Tex-Mex restaurant called Illegal Jacks, across Lothian Road and up a little from Film House. Big, bright and fairly empty (as were the other restaurants in the area that evening) with a good basic menu with types of filling, meat,  type of wrap, and so on. Your choice is prepared on the spot in front of you and then you retreat to a table and scoff it! Very good, and I hope they succede. I’ve said for years that a good fast mexican or Tex-Mex take-away (which this also does) would be a good business to open…

Last night we were back at Filmhouse, this time to see Oil City Confidential, the (sort of) biopic of the 70s band Doctor Feelgood.

I saw them at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in the long hot summer of 1976 and was blown away by them. One of the best gigs I’ve ever been to – and this film captured some of that feeling, togther with a quirky history of the band members as they grew up on Canvey Island and then found success as a hard-driving r&b anti-prog & glam band.
Much of the film focused on Wilco’s anecdotes (Lee Brilleaux having died in 1994) with footage from old films, etc. cut in to illustrate the events – lots of East End gangster film references – comparing the group going to gigs to a gang planning raids. Lots of detail about growing up in the late 50s/early 60s. Quite nostalgic!
Very enjoyable, with interviews, etc. with everybody involved. More live footage of the band would have been nice, though. Have to go home and crank up Stupidity tonight!

Reflective Swan

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

Well, the snow may be gone, but the ponds, etc. are still thick with ice! last week we were at Inverleith, where it was still at least 2″ thick at the edges, this week we visited Blackford Pond, where it was still mainly covered in ice, but it seemed noticably thinner around the edges.
It had beeen thawing (more or less) for an extra week, aftert all!
The small bit of restored marshland at the western end was completely flooded with run-off from the hillside and the allotments but we were rewarded with the sight of a heron flying about (which we had seen perched in a tree by the pond earlier) and landing high up among the bare upper branches of one of the trees there…

After that we walked back to Morningside and the Morning Glory pub for some lunch. A ‘Gloryburger’ for M and sausage and mash for me. Pretty good, but their menu has lost it’s innovative edge and is now firmly in the standard pub grub category. No longer a pub we’ll go out of our way to visit, I fear. Maybe to sit outside of in summer.
Our dessert course was taken a bit later in The Tea Tree at Tollcross – coffee and a bun! – before making our way home for M to rest up a bit.

The evening before we had gone to see The Road, which was a depressing post-apocalyptic tale set in a nuclear winter, with an improbable happy ending tacked on the end. (Same as the book, but with added friendly doggie!).  Sadly, I found it difficult to empathise with either of the main characters; the father had probably slipped over the border and ceased to be a ‘good guy’ by the end of the film, and the boy’s behaviour veered all over the place, from extremely childish and almost uncontrolable, to reasonably mature. He seemed to have virtually no independence, yet I’d have expected a child brought up in the circumstances to be almost feral, with much better scavenging skills, etc. than he showed…

Having failed to go to London to see Peter Hammill doing a solo show, on the Sunday evening I dug out a video tape of him performing half a dozen songs with SG, his mad violinist, in a German bookshop back in 1998  and enjoyed that instead! Excellent ‘unplugged’ sort of performance, definitely more intimate and enjoyable than the footage of the evening’s ‘proper’ concert that followed! Would still have liked to have seen his London gig, though…

So it’s another year again, and already into the dull stretch after new Year!

Madeleine’s health still improves, and although she’s still using sticks, she’s going for periods of time without them when we can find suitable stretches of quiet, smooth paths, etc. Like the road down from Stockbridge to Inverleith Park, where we were on Sunday!
The ice was still thick on the pond, with a small section of open water for the birds at the western end. I guess the ice was between 2 & 3 inches thick… We wandered over the the Botanics and spent some time in the John Hope Gateway building, mainly at a small exhibition tucked away past the restaurant of some cyanotypes and chromatographs by an artist M is interested in.

Their centrepiece free-standing wooden spiral staircase is currently closed off, and may remain so for some time; apparently it’s moving about in ways it shouldn’t when people use it! You’d have thought the Millennium Bridge debacle would have taught engineers and architects that deliberately wobbly things need serious thought!

Their set lunch menu didn’t appeal, or an afternoon tea, so we went up to the cafe for a snack of some sort, only to find they were shut (last orders at 3!) so we ended up in the Orchard bar having a rather large portion of fish that looked very nice, and a cheese souffle which was as good as last time I had it!

On Saturday evening we had finally made it along to see Avatar in 3D – we both enjoyed it a lot, despite the rather thin story. So many references could be name-checked, or nits picked, but why bother? We weren’t ecpecting War and Peace! Although there was a war, and it ended in peace!
Next film we see is likely to be Moon, which we missed in the Autumn; Filmhouse have a single showing in a couple of weeks…

Last Minute Shopping

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

Merry Christmas, everyone!
If you look closely, you can see a rare Christmas Eve shopper!

Madeleine’s just had her 8-week assessment following her 2nd hip operation, and everything’s fine!

That’s not to say that she’s fully recovered yet; she’s been advised to keep using both sticks until she feels she can do without them both – using only one would affect her posture adversely – and being able to sleep on her side, etc. will come when it feels natural and pain free. Some medication and various alignment excercises will continue as well and her stamina needs to improve also…

Anyway, excellent news although it does mean that soon she’ll have to back to work!

On-Line Research

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

As it’s Friday the 13th again, it’s also Prehistoric Creatures Day again!

As a treat, I let one of the big mammoths run the shop for a while; he spent most of the time online, researching his genealogy!
My Flickr stream has at least one other shot of this November’s PCD, as we also went to a restaurant for breakfast (not with a big mammoth, though!)

There’s a link here to the story behind Prehistoric Creatures Day

Silent Corner of the Empty Stage

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

On Saturday evening it was Mark Eitzel time again! He plays Scotland at least once a year it seems, and this time the gig was in Edinburgh… Madeleine is still recovering from her op (see below) so it was just me this time.

I got there in time to catch the last song of the support guy (who also played accordian on one of Mark’s songs) and to discover that they didn’t have any beer on tap, only bottles. Grrr. £3.50 for a bottle of IPA.

Mark came on after a very short turn-a-round and proceeded to sing 9 songs (plus 1 encore) backed only by a pianist. No guitar this time around! But his voice despite his initial misgivings was in fine form and he often didn’t seem to be using the mic to it’s fullest advantage!
Eventually, he was standing in front of the mic stand and not bothering to use the mic at all, even as a prop.
A mix of new songs and several oldies adapted from guitar, so it sometimes took a little while for me to recognise them!
At the end he signed an Everclear Sessions cd to me,and I also bought his latest release, Klamath, named after the town he recorded it in. Good gig, and fairly well-attended as far as I could tell, but not the best I’ve seen him… I said to him I’d see him next time, and I probably will!
(There’s another picture, with him in it, in my ‘Gigs & Events’ set on Flickr)

On the Sunday it was a fine day and Madeleine and I went for a bit of a walk – all the way into town to Turquaz (ex- Rudi’s) in at Nicolson Street, which was I guess, almost 1/2 mile. This is pretty good progress for Madeleine since her 2nd hip op only 3 weeks ago!
She had some sort of filled roll while I had the Turkish Breakfast, which was really nice; spicy sausage, cheese, tomato, olives, fried eggs, toast, jam and a couple of other items. I then abandoned her to her caffatiere of coffee and nipped down to Holyrood to pick up an early Christmas present – tickets for the Queen’s Gallery exhibition of Antarctic photographs. We want to go see it then with my father and my sister.

en route via Hutton's Garden

Back up to the cafe, where Madeleine is by now enjoying a hot chocolate, and then home again, a little slower than earlier, but still making reasonable time, adding up to about a mile in total!

In the afternoon, I had fun crawling about on some scaffolding erected outside our front window, clearing accumulated detritus and mud from our guttering – which is pretty awkward to do usually! And hopefully the workmen will actually turn up soon to do the maintainance work the scaffolding is there for!

Last year’s gig (with picture of empty stage!) – AMC at Stereo

p.s. the title is a Hammill reference, but there’s no other connection than that I’m a fan of both of them.

So Madeleine had her 2nd hip op on Monday just over two weeks ago, and came home last Monday. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as they might have, but in and out of hospital in 8 days for a fairly invasive surgical procedure is still pretty good going!

Anyway, progress is made every day; yesterday was her first outing beyond practicing going up and down the stairwell – we went over to the Metropole for breakfast!
Today she’s out again, hospital visiting, but in theory that involves no more walking than yesterday’s expedition…

Not sure how far we’ll get on Sunday (it’s dark too early on other days to do much outside) but if the weather’s ok we should get a few yards at least! Maybe even to Peter’s Yard for coffee and cardamom buns! Bit doubtful about that, though, come to think of the distances involved.

Mark Eitzel plays at the Cabaret Voltaire on Saturday; pretty certain Madeleine won’t manage along, but I might!

Last night I went to a discussion chaired by Ken McLeod, in his capacity as writer-in-residence at the Genomics Dept. of the university, down at Moray House.

Interesting stuff, about the perception of scientists as promulgated by works of written sf. And he had asked if I could sell some books during the intervals, so I made some money as well! And got free drink.

But the big news is that Madeleine got a phone call about her operation offering her a cancellation spot – which, after due consultation with her boss, she accepted.
So her 2nd hip op will be on Monday.

This Monday! 19th October, and we expect that she’ll be home by the weekend and the recovery process will start all over again! But this time she’ll have two good hips, not a replacement and one that has been becoming increasingly painful as the other side improved…