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The Stockbridge and New Town Community Orchestra celebrates its 20th anniversary tonight with a concert in Stockbridge Parish Church (Saxe-Coburg Street).

The orchestra began with a very small group in 1995, and has continued to grow since. Its members attend weekly rehearsals and stage two performances per year.

According to their website, they welcome all abilities, all ages and all backgrounds – anyone who can handle Grade 3 or 4 on up – and they never hold auditions.

Regarding Broughton Street on a wet Wednesday afternoon in late May, who is not instantly reminded of Passadena?

Are those lampposts not reminiscent of palm trees? Don’t the fag butts floating in puddles remind you of lilos in swimming pools under a cloudless Californian sky?

And couple all this glamour with the sudden preponderance locally of bored students with no exams left to do and no job to go to, and what have you got?

Of course: Mike Nichols’s The Graduate transposed to the Athens of the North.

MONTAUTI'S 'BUST OF AN OLD GROTESQUE WOMAN' 

Not all art has to be about pretty pictures, writes Rhys Fullerton. Sometimes art will show us something that’s not nice to look at. It may even be hideous, but it can be hard to look away.  

'Bust of an Old Grotesque Woman' is a favourite of mine because it’s not at all attractive and yet it draws you in and asks some profound questions.

In a corner of one of the rooms in the Scottish National Gallery, sits this incredible marble sculpture, possibly by Antonio Montauti.

Events like this don't happen on our doorstep every day, so forgive just a few more images of yesterday's Gretna commemoration and then we'll stop. 

First, right, Princess Anne approached much of the morning's proceedings with studious concentration. 

Below, ranks of Royal Scots veterans lined up under the trees for the service of remembrance. We wondered, sometimes, how much the relations and descendants behind could see.

Canny locals followed the live coverage on a giant screen in Pilrig Park ...

Spurtle likes this armless addition in mid-air on Queen Street Gardens East.

How long has it it been there? We don't know.

How long before it is taken away in a drunken embrace? Who can say? 

In the meantime, we like it even more from the front, where it becomes apparent that the ivy is arranged in an artful question mark.

Parades and an act and service of remembrance took place this morning to mark the centenary of the Gretna Train Disaster.

There was pomp, circumstance, and solemnity aplenty. And also many lighter moments as spirits soared in the early summer sunshine.

The day began on Dalmeny Street, where a procession formed outside the Drill Hall at 9.45am, just as the original funeral cortege had done nearly a hundred years before. The parade stepped off at 10.15am passing across Leith Walk and down Pilrig Street.

'In memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and men 1:7th Batallion the Royal Scots, Leith Territorial Battalion, who met their death at Gretna on 22nd May 1915, in a terrible railway disaster on their way to fight for their country.

'This memorial and a bed in Leith Hospital are dedicated by mourning comrades and friends.

'"Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me."'

The crime rate in Edinburgh was 35 per cent lower in 2014 than in 2004, according to Scottish Government Crime Statistics.

Try telling that to the dozens of small businesses across Broughton and the New Town which have had their premises none too subtly broken into in recent years by thieves looking for cash and easily trouserable goods unsecured within.

I have spent quite a lot of time recently skulking behind bins in the Bellevue and Claremont area, writes Fred Street of the New Town Clean Streets Campaign. 

The idea has been to keep tabs on the not-altogether-straightforward Recycling Trial taking place in the neighbourhood. 

Some interesting patterns are emerging. 

By NTCSC's calculations, the average willingness of a Claremont resident to walk to find an appropriate bin for their recycling is no more than 2 metres. 

How is this figure arrived at? 

RHYS FULLERTON REVIEWS: SLAVS AND TATARS' LEKTOR

Lektor is a solo-exhibition and new commission in Collective’s City Dome by art collective Slavs and Tatars.  

Slavs and Tatars have taken an influential 11th-century Turkic epic, Kutadgu Bilig (Wisdom of Royal Glory), and translated it into five languages. The audio installation is spoken in Uighur (NW China), Turkish, German, Polish, Arabic and Scottish Gaelic.