The Staff of Life

Although the sun and blue sky wakened me at 6am, by the time his Lordship and I were ready to trundle forth from the castle, the clouds had appeared and it was feeling a bit arctic again.

Having heard of a parade of soldiers from 3 Rifles and 1 Scots returning from Afghanistan, we rearranged our walk into town and headed for the Royal Mile. There was an amazing crowd gathered all the way down to Holyrood House where Princess Alexandra took the salute and the soldiers received their service medals.

I stood beside two shivering lads from Brighton, up for a stag do. One of them, on his first visit to the capital, loved Edinburgh was amazed that it was stuck in the middle of nowhere! I tried to point out that it was in the middle of the industrial belt, near to Glasgow and Dundee, but I really couldn't work out why he had this idea. Perhaps by flying up from Gatwick, he had approached over the Lake District, the Cheviots and the Southern Uplands so hadn't seen the urban sprawl of the central belt.
Sometimes the ignorance of our fellow countrymen far south of the border is shocking.

We battled through the crowds to the Farmer's market for bread and the important blip and then on to look at furniture in Shandwick Place. This afforded us the luxury of a sit down while testing the settees. It's probably just as well we didn't make it to the bedding department or we might have had a lie down too.

After the obligatory coffee and cake we made it home via the Meadows with a vista of pink blossomed trees and white bottomed cricketers. Lovely!

I've posted 4 blips of the parade on flickr if you're interested.