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The Union Gallery celebrates its anniversary this month with a group exhibition featuring work by some of the artists who have shown here over the previous five years.

No particular theme prevails, although there’s a general lightness of touch which matches the season and the sunshine-flooded premises.

What follows is a selection of personal favourites, from which others are omitted mostly for reasons of space or some difficulty in photographing them adequately. More images will follow later in the month.

Spurtle's David Sterratt has been asking why Edinburgh's new trams keep getting stuck on Princes Street. Those in the know were only too glad to explain.

Although I wasn’t convinced in 2007 that Edinburgh should have trams (for the record, I waged a minor campaign to look at the argument for trolleybuses), now that they're here, I have to confess that the ride is lovely.

Neighbours are practically farting sparks at the latest developments on East Scotland Street Lane.

For the benefit of readers with too much time on their hands over the summer, we present a 26-part word quiz, whose overall theme is suggested by the picture right.

Each answer has a numbered visual and verbal clue. All but one of the answers comprise one or two words (the exception has three) and have a similarity to each other, but there is no particular order. Solve one, and the rest will follow more easily.

Pictured here is the cipher panel on the wall of No. 29 Spey Terrace.

All sources agree that it comprises the monogram of the Edinburgh Artisan Building Company, which built the tenement here in 1867 in common cause (to provide better working-class housing) with the Pilrig Model Buildings completed over the road a few years earlier.

Shrubhill House on Leith Walk will be demolished over a period of around eight weeks, announced STV yesterday.

It is to be replaced by September next year with five commercial units and accommodation for 260 students.

Spurtle decided to have a last look at the building before bits of it begin to disappear.

Here are some more of the wonderful works currently on show in Northumberland Street’s Gallery on the Corner.

Pictured right is the first in Yun Chu, Kuo’s three-part ‘Watering’.

I find these calm evocations of leaves, eddies and reflections – produced on rice paper with Chinese painting pigment – simply charming.

There is some really excellent work on display at the Gallery on the Corner just now. 

During the Spurtle paper-round on Monday, this foot-slogger was bowled over first by Jean Gillespie’s ‘Morning Glow (Cuba)’, pictured right.

Gillespie is Edinburgh-based (with a studio in Dalry). Her work at present ‘is based on themes derived from the figure or landscape,’ she says.

‘I am trying to create a reality in my work through which another separate world can be glimpsed.’

Local residents have alerted the Council to what they claim is unauthorised work using a JCB on land adjacent to 62 Broughton Road (the area known locally as 'Sandy Hill'). Officials investigated the situation this morning.

What do you buy the politically engaged diner in your life who has everything?

The answer is now obvious: a £600 set of six dinner plates featuring key players in Scotland’s Independence Referendum debate.

The pieces are the handiwork of Edinburgh artist Leigh Chorlton, who has been displaying them in an exhibition entitled Pollster in White Space’s gallery on Howe Street.