Hot July brings cooling showers, which is good news for anyone hoping for eternal monsoon season in Spurtleshire. If you close your eyes and imagine really hard, you can pretend you’re in Sri Lanka. (Because they have monsoon season there. Come on, you could have worked that out from the context).
If, on the other hand, you’d rather go oot, there will now follow a not particularly helpful list of things to do and places to go this month. Hold on tight.
For those tired of traipsing all the way to Princes Street in order to watch men standing around looking at holes in the ground, Edinburgh’s popular touring roadworks festival remains on Broughton Street for the next fortnight. Highlights include That Awkward Moment when the Hole Fillsw with Rainwater and Someone Accidentally Falls in and gets ttheir Feet All Wet, and That Night the Inebriated Person goes Headfirst into the Temporary Fence and Knocks the Whole Lot Over.
A short walk away at Holyrood, the World Press Photo Exhibition opens at the Scottish Parliament on 5 July and runs until the 28th. Worth a look to compare what people in other countries are worrying about when we’re debating trams and potholes.
Doubtless you’ll be hungry after that, so in a brilliant segue the Taste of Edinburgh returns to the Meadows for 6–8 July. This is of course miles outside our jurisdiction, so don’t blame us if it turns out thar be monsters – after all, Lloyd Grossman is involved this year.
Continuing with that theme, if you fancy a day in Angus (and other sentences you never thought you’d say), the Montrose Donkey Derby has been postponed till 15 July due to poor weather. And you thought you’d missed out! But there’s still time to organise a car pool and everything. Moments like this make life worth living …
… Which is how some folk feel about the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, running from 20– 9 July. Some elements of this are a short trot away from Spurtle boundaries, including Curtis Stigers at Le Monde (16 George Street) and North Mississippi Allstars Duo at the Voodoo Rooms (19a West Register Street). They beat boring old Madonna at Murrayfield any day.
Art now, and you still have a chance to see the ExtINKed exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens (20a Inverleith Row) until the end of July. If you’ve not come across this yet, in 2009 one hundred rare and endangered British species were illustrated by artist Jai Redman and tattooed upon one hundred volunteers to act as ambassadors for threatened birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates, mammals, plants and fungi. This exhibition documents the whole experiment, and even better, it’s free. Enjoy!