"a short, dead... dude?"

Although some of the other economy-sized gravestonettes in Greyfriars' boneyard have the vital corpse-identifying information hacked into the uppermost portion of the stone's edge (instead of into the face like normal) the name and pertinent chronological minimum and maximum of the gentleperson remembered by this particular slab is either concealed beneath the grass or gone forever. I suppose the church-people must keep records of who's buried where in case they ever need to move or exhume-for-criminal-investigation them but to the casual observer the occupant of this particular spot remains fashionably incognito. In its way it's a lot more dignified than the rather more ostentatious memorials infesting the walls of graveyards where in addition to the mortal statistics there's a swathe of extraneous garbage detailing choice extracts of the life and times of the remembered to an almost embarrassing degree; some of them read a little bit like the blurb on the dust jackets of biographies though many just go for long-winded explanations of how into their religion the deceased and their families were and which family members were already dead or still alive at the time of carving, possibly with subtle omissions to slight relatives who didn't visit often enough.

Despite having sponsored a colleague doing the Pedal for Scotland ride only this morning I had completely forgotten about it and was thus puzzled by the large number of cars-with-bikes-on-their-rooves driving south as I rode to Cramond from the A8. I wondered briefly if they'd all driven to the seafront, cycled around for a bit then started to drive home again. After further trundlings I ended up having to cross the path of the participants to get from the Trinity tunnel to the Warriston path. One of the reasons I didn't really consider doing it is that one bicycle is OK, a few bicycles are also OK and a reasonable amount of bicycles are OK as long as there's enough space for them. It would have been hell for someone even vaguely impatient to have had to sit in a big crowd of slow-moving erratically-steering people such as those I had to wait to roll slowly past before squeezing through a tiny gap, especially for sixty miles. I tend to get annoyed if I have to overtake more than five people per mile of canalside-cyclepath as tends to be the case at weekends.