Live events involving mass gatherings at Edinburgh’s Christmas 2020 have been cancelled due to ‘uncertainty’ surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.
The season will instead be celebrated like Hogmanay online and from home.
Below is the full version of an article which appears in condensed form in the October printed issue of the Spurtle, published today.
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The common people of this country must certainly have the organ of destructiveness enormously developed. Nothing that they can possibly lay their hands upon escapes demolition.
As you read this, advance copies of the latest issue are already spreading across the barony like traffic cones borne on an East Wind. Only less orange, more soft, and unlikely to be repositioned by motorists.
Page 1 looks at the shape of things to come – too massive according to some, too puddinglike according to others – and at the scourge of plastic and beardy types washing up on our beaches.
Looking to spice up your midweek chicken dinner? This dish offers you a great spin on the traditional use of chicken breast – and adds an Italian twist, as my recipes often do. Finding a way to incorporate some ingredients of my beloved Parmigiana in this chicken recipe was a fun exercise made all the more enjoyable by the fact that I was standing in my mum's kitchen!
The lack of ‘natural surveillance’ on our streets during Lockdown was probably the biggest contributor to an outpouring of graffiti and tagging across Broughton over recent months.
Much of this was just dull and disfiguring.
But other examples have deployed considerable skill, wit, and self-conscious irony. There are clearly private conversations enacted here in public, flytes whose content the uninitiated can only guess at.
This work by Archibald Williams (1871–1934), currently displayed in the window of bookbinders and sellers The Gently Mad on Inverleith Row, optimistically anticipates numerous life-improving innovations from the distant perspective of 1902.
They include:
Police in Edinburgh issued the following press release yesterday. We reproduce it below unedited and in full.
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Serious road crash – Great King Street, Edinburgh
Officers from Edinburgh Road Policing Unit are continuing their enquiries and appealing for information after a road crash on Friday, 18 September, 2020.
Friends of Warriston Cemetery have recently uncovered the headstone of Owen Duffy, a merchant and ‘champion athlete’ who lived from 1848–96. Duffy has been on Spurtle’s radar for some time.
Duffy was born in Ireland, but at the time of the 1891 census he sold china from his business at 45 Carlyle Place. His home was just down the road at No. 1, where he lived with his wife Isabella and four Edinburgh-born children.
Donaldson1 recalls Duffy as follows:
Scott Hobbs Planning, on behalf of MMMARS Dundas Limited has submitted a proposal of application notice to the Council for property at 108–14 and 116 Dundas Street (20/03923/PAN).