An item of "Breaking News". Will appear on the Breaking News page and the front page.
On a rare evening outing to the pub, I only had time for a swift half or two and I intended to make the most of it and choose my venue wisely.
I went to the Cask & Barrel, but was put off by the handwritten list of who was and wasn’t allowed in the premises. No children inside, no children outside, no dogs, no goats, no geese, no gnomes. I was so confused after reading the list that I decided to try elsewhere just in case I was thrown out for not complying.
August’s Spurtle (Issue 232) is printed, folded, bundled into tens, and now being loaded onto a caravan of GPS-guided delivery-llamas ready for distribution across the barony.
This month we cover crashes, skeletons and the Calton Centre, problems with post, philanthropy, cats, rabbits, tigers and wee things which bite where they shouldn’t, the damned beautiful, the lost, the cheeky, the mysterious, the having-a-laugh, winged, perplexing, underground, flowering, unexpected, unblinking, naked, tasty, surprisingly large, politically unreliable, musical and ingenious.
Returning home yesterday evening, Spurtle reader Miranda Gilhooley spotted this curious message attached to the policebox in Drummond Place.
Measuring, ‘framed’, roughly the size of a postcard, it reads like an overhead snippet from a stranger’s telephone conversation.
'Humdrum but interesting,' Gilhooley describes it. 'Steven sounds nice.'
Tesco Stores Ltd has now applied for listed building consent to complete a new shopfront and automatic doors, a level ramped entrance, a protective pedestrian barrier, external roof plant to the rear, and internal retail fit-out at 30–30a Dundas Street (Ref. 14/02746/LBC).
There’s something intensely intimate about books. Especially old ones.
That agreeable memory of ink and leather, polish, damp and slight decay. That moment of literally burying one’s nose in the gutter. Of being engrossed. Of witnessing the object’s gradual disintegration between one’s fingers, encountering spines, discovering that they too sometimes consist of words drawn from earlier printed sources.
Edinburgh-based visual artist Jo McDonald delves deep into just such territory in work showing this month at McNaughtan’s Bookshop (Fringe Venue 102).
The sporting types at Villeneuve Wines on Broughton Street have been celebrating yesterday’s win of the 101st Tour de France by Vincenzo Nibali.
The 29-year-old Italian won with a margin of 7 minutes and 39 seconds, and is one of only six men to win the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana.
Respected by professional riders for his uncompromising determination, he is known among them – not altogether affectionately – as 'The Shark of Messina'.
Well done, Kimberley Reed! The high-flying Broughton hammer thrower last week won through to the Final of the World Juniors Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
Kimberley qualified from her heat with a best throw of 58.57m.
In the Final itself on Thursday, she began with 59.96m in the first round, extending this to 60.17m before getting a red card in the third round and so losing the chance of a further three throws.
This was her best throw in around two months, and a welcome return to form on the big occasion.
Earlier this year, Spurtle reported the Post Office’s consultation on a likely move out of the St James Centre and into Unit 5/6 Princes Mall (Breaking news, 14.2.14).
That relocation has since been confirmed for 22 September 2014, prompting Mark Lazarowicz MP to again ask questions about:
Archaeologists say skeletons discovered during tramwork preparations have told them a lot about how people lived and died in Leith hundreds of years ago.
City of Edinburgh Council and Headland Archaeology dug up the remains of nearly 400 people from beneath Constitution Street in 2009. All are now in permanent storage.
They constitute what City Archaeologist John Lawson describes as ‘one of the largest and most important urban excavations of human remains undertaken in Edinburgh and Scotland in recent years’.
In January of this year, City of Edinburgh Council refused permission for Batleys Limited (the wholesale cash and carry on McDonald Place) to permanently extend its delivery and loading hours from 7am–8pm on Monday–Saturday and 8.30am–noon on Sundays (Breaking news, 21.1.14).
They wanted to preserve the amenity of local residents, some of whom had complained of disruption by lorries and crashing cages.