Solidity

Once again, with an early start, I had enough time this morning to take a bus up to the Scott Monument, and then wander up the Mound and back down the Royal Mile to take a look at Edinburgh in stunning light, and to see what was left of recent events. Remarkably little is the answer. Some remnants of the many barriers and crowd control and road closure mechanisms that were in place, but not really all that much.

What really struck me, in a way, was how the city had shrugged everything off and continues on its way. The geography that helps to make Edinburgh unique is largely millions of years old. The volcanic spines on which the Old Town is built. Some geographical features are much newer, such as the drainage of the nor' loch and the meadows loch centuries rather than millennia ago. And much of the architecture is obviously centuries old too. It seems to me that even such momentous events as those we have seen in the last few days are shrugged off by the city, which returns to its old ways. Streets are open. Buses are (more or less) running again. Welcome Week continues. There's more than a smattering of tourists. I guess that's one of the things that makes it such a magical place to live. We are all but "blips" (in the time sense....).

Anyway, although these are camera not phone photos, I fiddled around to make them a collage, in order to present more of what I saw today.

Onwards and upwards with more introductory events and a few one-to-ones. As someone pointed out, I'd survived three fifths of Welcome Week, so I'll take that as a win.