Breaking news

What is that strange excitement in the air? What is that gathering vibration? Is it the tremor of erupting crocuses? Is it the massed yawns of wakening hedgehogs? The beat of migrant wings returning from the South?

No. It's the clatter of Spurtle’s May issue bursting from the presses like a huge thunderplump of hyperlocal news, views, heads-ups, hands on hearts and mixed metaphors.

Issue 240 contains musical and chronometrical developments, an imminent absence and a likely arrival.

City of Edinburgh Council and The Collective gallery have come forward with plans for a major re-imagining of the Observatory Complex on Calton Hill (Ref. 15/01737/LBC). 

Collective’s vision is to be:

Spring in Edinburgh. 

First, let's start with the theory. 

Pictured right, the window of a Rodney Street café has been decorated with seasonal blooms in an optimistic, yellowy display redolent of new growth and lambkins gambolling over the sunlit meadows of Heriot Hill. 

Now, the reality. 

Below, filmed this afternoon from an East Claremont Street window, the first signs of an 'Arctic ploom' heading for Edinburgh this evening. Occasional snow and hailstones. On 27 April. Perishing.

Many Broughton residents are avowed Nature lovers.

Many spend hours studying or attempting to improve the lot of our scaly, feathered and four-footed friends.

But any objective observer would have to say that sometimes Nature doesn’t help itself.

Take a look at this mound of stuff pulled recently from the Water of Leith and now piled ready for a Council uplift from St Mark’s Park.

To everyone's relief, the sun shone on this afternoon's Pedal on Parliament. 

Thousands gathered in the Meadows at lunchtime, before cycling along streets closed to vehicles and strangely quiet but for the tinkling of bells and the clatter of fillings juddering out of their teeth and onto the capital's innumerable setts.

The massed bicyclists of Edinburgh (and from as far afield as Elgin) reconvened outside Holyrood, where politicians mingled with each other and members of the public were encouraged to ask them awkward questions.

One topic which arises frequently in correspondence with locals is how the Council decides how many bins to put in any particular street, writes Fred Street of the New Town Clean Streets Campaign. 

Here is a brief tutorial. 

Today, we received official notification of St Mary's Music School's interest in the old Royal High School.

The press release confirms what we exclusively reported in Breaking news (15.3.15).

The most immediately important point to emerge is that a new process of formal consultation with the Council has definitely begun.

Also of interest are previously unannounced individuals in the enabling Royal High School Preservation Trust. 

A new business looks set to fill the space at 46 Howe Street formerly occupied by News Corner (Ref. 15/00928/ADV) 

Pad Lifestyle Ltd have received consent to cover the  glass with ‘opaque window manifestations’, repaint  some of the woodwork ‘Downpipe’ grey, and install a modest copper-clad projecting sign which they will illuminate with mini-spotlights.

TOTEMS AND THE TRIBE: DAVID HILL ON CUMBERLAND STREET, GREAT KING STREET AND DRUMMOND PLACE  

Shadows cast by terrains long ago trodden can sometimes be long enough that they darken paths we now tread in different settings. They shape the way we map, understand, see current locations.

Edinburgh is, for me, a city to be negotiated in this manner. For here, I'm often reminded of the other places I have known.

When it comes to the shows, what appeals most to me about them is their discomfiting collisions. 

I love that unnerving interface of noise and glare, contrived illumination, dark, reward and vertigo, illusion, bravado, sweet, salt, nausea, potential sex and violence, gilt-edged fakery. 

Perhaps that explains my collection of ASBOs. It certainly explains my choice of four favourite works from this month's joint exhibition at the Union Gallery: All the Fun of the Fair.