Full Moon
Full moon over Edinburgh, 23 December 2018. Mouseover for Christmas Eve’s.
Full moon over Edinburgh, 23 December 2018. Mouseover for Christmas Eve’s.
In catching up on some photo sorting, I’ve realised that I’ve gone a bit panorama-crazy over the past few years. Here are four more widescreen galleries from my travels this year and last:
Next year I’ll focus on some non-panoramic instalments in Detail.
Last night we took the kids along to the University of Edinburgh’s carol service in the recently restored McEwan Hall, the first time I’d been to one at the university, and the first time I’d been up in the gods there (I’ve processed on stage a few times for graduations). The service was great, with a particularly moving rendition of “O Holy Night”. A welcome opportunity to forget about Brexit—and to take photographs of the ceiling.
I made it down to London in time for the People’s Vote March on Saturday, and was proud to have been there. It may be ignored by the government and mocked by Leavers on social media, but when we’re all scrabbling around for our last tin of beans next year, those of us who were there can at least take some solace from having tried.
I took a ton of photos, and will put up a gallery of them here in the next few days. But first up, here’s a compilation of the short videos I took, as posted to YouTube.
It’s a while since I posted a regular ol’ photo here. This is at Saughton in Edinburgh, looking down from a stone bridge onto the Water of Leith, on Sunday afternoon.
Today is the kids’ first day back at school since last Tuesday, after a Siberian weather system swept over Britain and blanketed Edinburgh with the most snow we’ve seen since 2010. It was unusual snow for us, too: dry and powdery, Rockies-style. Good skiing weather, if we only we could have got the car out of its snow-covered side street and driven to the hills.
It didn’t feel particularly cold once the wind dropped, but the whole place ground to a halt. It snowed for a few days in January, too, but that was fine—the kids went to school, we went to work. This time, not only were the kids off school for three days, but my university closed early on Wednesday and stayed closed for the rest of the week. I can’t remember it ever closing because of snow before.
My kids have been learning some Scots poems at school for Burns Night over the past week—Burns’s “To a Mouse” for my older son, and “Twa-Leggit Mice” by the late Edinburgh poet J. K. Annand for my younger daughter. Cue a week of her asking for a snack by exclaiming, “Jings! I get fair hungert.”
I amused them both by reading out the Annand poem in my broadest Aussie accent. (It’s more honest than trying it in faux-Ewan McGregor.) Which reminds me that Burns Night on 25 January aligns with the morning of Australia Day on 26 January back in Oz, thanks to the time difference. Jings, I could go a snag.