Prescience

It must have been some sort of prescience that I snapped this view of David Hume and St Giles as I walked up from Princes Street to the Quartermile for an early morning coffee meeting. For St Giles will be at the centre of many events in Edinburgh over the next few days, and I guess the almost immediate road closures are to do with security and likely rehearsals of events.

I realised something was definitely "up" not just from the official notifications that appeared on social media, but because the chair of the meeting I was in, who is on the University's senior leadership team, turned up late to the meeting (even though he was supposedly chairing it) and looked a bit shell shocked and sombre, where normally he is jolly. He let us know about the possible outcome (without making a prejudgement), and by the end of the meeting was able to tell us more about the likely impact upon Welcome Week next week if the Queen were to die. While things will be going ahead, there will be significant physical disruption around the centre of Edinburgh, which is going to make life tricky, especially with large numbers of buses diverted from what have become their "normal" routes. I suspect there will be a *lot* of walking backwards and forwards next week.

I stayed late at work, which enabled me to get a start on my jobs set aside for Friday, which was handy. I was due at a dinner at 7.30pm. I left there around 10pm, intending to get a number 7 on George IV Bridge (last time that will be possible for a while). It never turned up, disappearing off the bus app ten minutes later, and just before a number 14 belatedly turned up, so did a taxi with its light on. I cut my losses, since I was already pretty drookit despite wearing a supposedly waterproof coat.

The contrast with Monday when everyone was sitting out for dinner and drinks could not have been starker. We are now making up for our dry August with a September with rain of monsoon proportions. That's something else I hope will change before Monday, to make it all a little better for the students in these strange times of change.