It started with a tweet highlighting an episode from On the Air, a series of short animations from BBC Northern Ireland of talk radio from The Gerry Anderson Show dating back to the 2000s. The hypno-hen soon went viral, and now the late broadcaster’s family have set up a website in his honour.
Click through for a gallery.
I was in at the office today, with its view onto Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. As we approached the starting time of the procession of the Queen’s coffin to St Giles, I ducked downstairs to take some photos, joining some colleagues behind the locked gates of Moray House. After twenty minutes the chatter died down and a sea of arms pointed their phones downhill; members of security walked past, followed by two officers on horseback, the hearse, and the King and his siblings walking slowly behind; then a string of cars, one with Camilla, the rest all Range Rovers; and then it was over.
Apart from a barking dog and a crying baby, the crowd was hushed at our part of the Mile. A few moments earlier, though, a protestor had let Prince Andrew know what he thought.
This procession only took place because the Queen died in Scotland; otherwise the focus would have remained on London. I don’t expect to see another like it in my lifetime, even if I’m around for another king.
Our local corner shop yesterday.
Electronic billboards across the land are displaying pictures of the Queen against a black background, making it look like we’re hosting the world’s biggest philately convention. Paddington has sent his condolences. The royal beekeeper has informed the Queen’s bees that the Queen (though presumably not their queen) has died. Even the Cromwell Museum has retweeted the local mayor’s condolences.
Any understandable sympathy one might feel for the human beings at the centre of all this is going to be stretched to the limit by this marathon of mourning. Twelve days is longer than some overseas trips.
At some point in the next day or so, Edinburgh residents will have the chance to file past the Queen’s coffin in St Giles. Given that we’re here, it would seem a missed historic opportunity not to add to the throng, and so despite having exceeded my annual royal threshold I imagine we will. Please adjust your estimates of the scale of monarchist grief accordingly.
(I’m reliably informed that “telling the bees is a tradition in many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper’s lives such as births, marriages and departures and returns in the household”. Feeding the workers’ obsession with the lives of their keepers, eh—more relevant than I thought.)
I really couldn’t be bothered posting about the inevitable ascent this week of Liz Truss, fourth in a line of decreasingly appealing and increasingly appalling Conservative prime ministers, but I suppose I’d better mark the day when we woke up as subjects of Queen Elizabeth II and will go to bed as subjects of King Charles III. It’s my first experience of the death of a British monarch, and provided I stick around for the average lifespan won’t be my last.
It’s August in Edinburgh, and I’ve found myself seeing more Fringe shows than I’ve been able to in a decade; last year (or was it 2019?) I caught Tony Law one lunchtime, and one or two Free Fringe shows with pals, and before that it was only one or two family-oriented shows a year when the kids were younger. I did okay in 2012, with a handful of adult-oriented comedy shows and more, but this was by far my busiest year since 2006, seeing shows with friends, the whole family, my son, and on my own. The Fringe has shaken off the pandemic (there weren’t many masks in most audiences); and even a bin strike, which turned the city centre into a heaving mass of litter and overflowing skips within 48 hours and is still going over a week later, didn’t dampen the mood in the sweaty venues themselves.
Underbelly, George Square, 5 August. Click through for more.
At the start of the month I drove my son and his instruments all the way to Skye in a single day, via Callander, Glencoe and Fort William, for a week-long music camp culminating in a four-date tour around Scotland.† It’s quite a drive there from Edinburgh, so I didn’t try to get all the way home the same day, but stayed a night in Roybridge before making my way back through the Cairngorms. Glen Etive and Glencoe were as spectacular as always, and I got a few misty pics of Eilean Donan to add to my castle collages.
I first visited Argyll, the heart of the ancient kingdom of Dál Riata, in 1992 with my parents, but got to know it better after J. and I moved to Edinburgh in 2001. Over the next few years we took a few different visiting relatives there, and in between the inevitable family photos I took quite a few of the surroundings, only some of which have appeared before on this site. Two decades on, I’ve gathered them together to make a more substantial gallery, divided into four sections.
In the early years of posting galleries here and in Detail I put up a lot of photos of Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland, but hardly any of its biggest city. Although I visited Glasgow plenty of times for work and leisure, I never got around to collating my random snaps into something more substantial, even though several times I was photographing the city and its attractions intensively with eventual galleries in mind.
What the Internet really needs is more cat photos. This Chinchilla Persian is one of the stars of Maison de Moggy, Scotland’s first cat café, which we took our daughter to for her eleventh birthday. For an hour we got to eat cake surrounded by pampered felines, elaborate climbing frames and strands of cat hair. A great way to scratch that moggy itch (behind the ears) when you sadly don’t have one at home. Click through to see more.
Since my first Eurovision party in 2004, with its memorable Ukrainian winner, I’ve only watched the final every few years. There have been some good songs and performances along the way, but not many from the UK. So when I caught the tail-end of the first semifinal on Tuesday and the rest of it the next day, I was left wondering if this year’s entry was any good. When I heard it, I was stunned to realise that the UK actually had a shot at winning for the first time in twenty years.