large electrical customer reception

When I first moved up here and started poking about with a map (which I'd actually bought a few weeks beforehand so that it wasn't entirely unknown when I arrived) I did the usual amount of exploring; the immediate environment had to be assessed to discover the location of the cheapest food-shops (Capital and WmLow), the cheapest source of household and kitchen items (Bargain Stores) and the nearest shop which sold jaffa cakes at one in the morning prior to the installation of Alldays in 1995 (Franco's chippy). The two main university campuses had to be located and mapped so that if my timetable told me that I had a lecture in (for example) the William Robertson Biochemistry Building that I would know immediately where it was and would not become eithe rinconveniently lost or not lost but a mile too far to the south. Useful landmarks were memorised so that I could always reliably work out the basics such as compass points and general directions. However, beyond my immediate surroundings and unavoidable locations I didn't immediately start investigating by going for massive walks all over the city, partly because I was happy enough to scuttle up and down the nearby hill for exercise and partly because I was mildly concerned that there were parts of modern Scottish cities where long-haired English-born students might face complications; little student-friendly informational distributions were always warning us to take care in gloomy alleys and (apparently) the Meadows at night. As it was the Meadows are pretty much unavoidable and not noticeably unsafer than anywhere else.

Little by little more distant areas became familiar (little pockets around cinémas and flats and eventually workplaces, canals and cycle paths) and I'd start to intermittently explore more distant areas deliberately (and on occasion by accident such as when I got on the wrong bus once and ended up in Wester Hailes instead of back in Newington); the odd trip now and then to points on the perimeter of the city helped to make it seem as small as I'd thought it was when looking at the atlas and an UCAS form and wondering how large a place I would be happy to live in (London, Glasgow. Birmingham, Newcastle and Manchester were discounted before I'd even started seeing as I was comng from somewhere with a population of less than three thousand which isn't tiny but is certainly not big). Fiveandabit years ago when I patched my bike up after a couple of years' inactivity I started making a conscious effort to bike and walk through bits I'd not biked or walked through before each time I biked or walked anywhere other than simple to/from journeys such as work and shops. A year and an half ago this started becoming an almost daily occurrence when I got my second-last camera and started investigating new and intriguing things, safe in the knowledge that if you're not safe from neds thirty feet from your front door then you might as well not worry too much about them being specifically in one alley or another, particularly when you have the ability to climb drainpipes at speed (although that didn't help when I had my bike too).

Nowadays I tend to take only two or three large-scale random investigative walks per week (sometimes as an extended journey home from work if not at lunchtime) and the rest of the time just try and vary my usual routes a little, chucking in the odd new alley or shortcut here and there.

The point is that today I tried to have a nice big daysworth of trundling around and investigating things and walking down the odd street down which I had previously not walked. I got one of those all-day bus ticket things too despite my hatred of bus drivers to get me to a couple of starting points.

I didn't actually end up getting any pictures from these strange newish places although there were a few things seen from hitherto unseen angles which did turn out unblurred despite the occasional gloom. Plenty of people too, including the bloke who asked for directions from the western harbour area to Annandale Street, stating that he didn't know the city in the slightest. Whilst it's easy enough to direct a walker it's trickier for someone in a car as I've very little idea of the one-way convolutions he might have had to face and there is traffic to look at which detracts from the monitoring of streetnames and landmarks.

The day was further enpleasanted by the interspersement of walking and photographing with sitting around reading, snorting at what I was reading and eating the occasional muffin.

And there's still the entire weekend to go.