Happy birthday

T’s birthday today. Neither he nor I can quite believe he’s now 36! He’s feeling middle aged and wasn’t very cheered by my usual refrain telling him he’ll never be as young as this again….!
I had a zoom call first thing so the guests all had a lie in and K went to buy fry up ingredients so we had a blow out brunch once my meeting was over.
We walked down via Room & Rumours and he had a biscoff bun -in lieu of a birthday cake - then we started a treasure hunt all around the Royal Mile and Holyrood that we’d downloaded It was good…kept us occupied and spotting parts of the town I’d never been aware of, reading plaques, seeing carvings, monuments and exploring the tiny closes off the High St. We popped into the Museum of Edinburgh on the way and interesting to read about the huge fire in 1824 that I’d never heard of before, destroying quite a chunk of the town between St Giles’ and the Tron church. Rather a good model of the old city to explore too.
Once we’d finished we celebrated in the Common’s Club bar of the new Virgin hotel (nice to get a huge pack of roasted nuts when we asked about snacks!). We dithered about whether to go home for a nap or carry on into town before our early dinner, and decided on the latter. We walked to Bramble bar on Queen’s St and were the first in! Enjoyed various cocktails (sea buckthorn spritz, a bramble, something with tequila and smoky stuff, aperol spritz and an apple one) whilst reminiscing about old TV programmes they used to watch and checking with K’s son via text about the details we couldn’t remember. I chatted to Kt about parkrun which she’s started and registered to go with her in Holyrood park tomorrow morning…I’ll just be walking though!
Over to Taisteal for dinner…very tasty. I had mackerel with linguine and puttanesca sauce, venison with butternut squash, chestnut and blackberries then Baileys crème brûlée. Delicious…everyone enjoyed theirs too.
Over to 63rd+1st to round the evening off with a final cocktail. We’d booked a table assuming the town would be really busy on a 6 nations match weekend. In fact it seemed very quiet and certainly the bar wasn’t even full…odd.
caught a cab home and had some peppermint tea before bed…we were too tired for Scrabble!