Breaking news

The Save Glenogle Baths campaign has delivered its last email update, and is to wind up shortly.
It has secured its aims of ensuring that the pool be conserved and maintained, and that the adjacent open space – 'the Snakey' – remain a public open space free from development.

In a gracious farewell, campaign Secretary Linda Wilson alliteratively thanked the committee, local councillors, City Council, contractors, Sport Scotland and Edinburgh Leisure, and the public.

'People power works,' she writes, 'and you helped us prove it'.

Blenheim Place was briefly cut off on Friday 9 May, but not as – first thought – by freak weather conditions.

The evening disruption was due to filming of the new John Lewis Christmas TV advertisement. False snow was liberally slathered as far as the camera could see in scenes reminiscent of Edinburgh last January and February.

Any locals who managed to photograph the filming are invited to share their images with the Spurtle.

Edinburgh landlords who first registered themselves as such in 2006 should sign up again in the next few months.

Under the Scottish Landlords Registration scheme, private landlords must log their details with City of Edinburgh Council once every 3 years. Around 12,000 landlords will have to re-register before the end of the year.

Registration costs £55 and £11 per property. Late re-registering applications will incur an additional £110 fee. (These sums are national ones set by the Scottish Government.)

Some readers have expressed concern at the non-appearance of our customary page-4 cartoon in Issue 184. They wonder if the much-feted 'MF' has been moved on or frozen out.

They need not make a fuss. MF is alive and well and very much still part of Spurtle. He was temporarily sidelined thanks to an editor made forgetful by the demands of paid work and impending holidays.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.  

Three very motivated and high-achieving students from an Italian secondary school will be studying at Drummond CHS next term, and require host families with whom to stay.

The girls come from Liceo Scientifico 'G.Ferrari', a high school for science located in Borgosesia in north-western Italy, and will be studying in Broughton from the end of August to the start of the Christmas holidays this year.

In Issue 181 we reported the arrest, in March, of two Bonnington Rd men for alleged involvement in a card skimming and cloning scam.

On Friday 2 July the pair were found guilty and jailed for two-and-a-half years.

When police had visited the men's flat they found a 'factory' complete with computer programs, specialist equipment for making counterfeit cards, and false fascias for cashpoint machines,

Princes Street will be closed westbound this weekend to allow 'remedial works' and 'tram maintenance'.

From 7pm on Friday 2 July to 5am on Monday 5 July, westbound buses will divert via George Street.

Click here for details.

A new two-person figurative exhibition will show at Broughton Street's Union Gallery from 1 July to 2 August. It features the work of two outstanding Scottish talents: Dylan Lisle and Patsy McArthur.

Both artists trained at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. Lisle's 'mastery of technique – married to his contemporary vision – creates work of beauty, serenity and mystery,' says Union's Rob Dawkins (see 'Knowledge' right). This is the largest body of his work to appear in Edinburgh for around eight years.

The newly refurbished Glenogle Baths were unveiled today to an invited audience of Councillors, Council officials, local people who had campaigned for the Baths to be saved, and press.

Tomorrow, members of the public can sample all the facilities free (for one day only). A timetable and price list are available at the foot of the page here.

The culprits disobligingly took off as soon as Spurtle's roving eye on the sky whipped out his camera this morning, but there's no mistaking the evidence. Eleven railing-mounted bin bags on the short western section of Fettes Row had been torn open by gulls, the contents strewn across the pavement.

The development will come as a blow to New Town residents who believed using railings would be a simple, free alternative to containerisation as a means of deterring pests. Clearly it is not.