The weather was much improved again today; yesterday was a weather blip. So we played tennis again at Leith Links in the morning.
Then off to have lunch at Marie and Joe’s new apartment in the south of Edinburgh, not too far from Summerhall and The Meadows. It took just over 45 minutes to get there door to door with a change of bus.
We had a guided tour of the new place, including the new kitchen and en suite bathroom, which we were thus seeing before Linda Cook gets to see them; which is sure to be a source of much consternation.
Joe cooked a rather wonderful fish pie as the centrepiece of the lunch. We had a cherry roularde and some cheeses to follow, so that was us pretty much sorted for food today. Nice wines too.
It was really good to see Marie and Joe in their new home environment; when I saw them in Edinburgh last year…
A Day At The Edinburgh Fringe Festival With Old Muckers, 22 August 2017
…their moving plans were still up in the air.
We had some very interesting conversation about the festival, Edinburgh generally, politics generally, death, siblings, niblings, isms and anti-isms. You get the idea.
When lunch came to a natural end, I announced that I wanted to seek some indoor tennis shoes from Bruntsfield Sports in Morningside on our way back to Edinburgh. Marie and Joe volunteered to walk off lunch with us and chat some more.
It turned out that Bruntsfield Sports in Morningside doesn’t do those shoes; it is their branch at David Lloyd that sells them.
Still, we were by then near a convenient bus stop for central Edinburgh, so said a fond goodbye to Marie & Joe while stepping onto a bus to Princes Street.
We sought out the Apple Store on Princes Street in a vain attempt to get Daisy’s iPhone re-batteried (takes hours, we’ll need to do that in London). But I did procure the very iPad keyboard upon which I am typing right now, which should make my travelling blogs easier to write (i.e. wordier) in future.
On the way to Apple I spotted a show, Let’s Talk About Porn, at C, which looked interesting; a troupe of youngsters and plenty of time to faff around at Apple. Once I realised that’s we needed very little faffing time at Apple, I spotted another performance, The Roots Of The Blues, near to the C show (theSpaceTriplex) and just about enough time to pick up the tickets and fit both shows in.
So we ended up doing the very thing we promised we wouldn’t do; ran around like mad things fitting in a couple of shows at near-breakneck pace.
Both shows were worth it. The Roots Of The Blues was a mix of lecture and performance by Toby Mottershead. Charming, informative and he’s also a very able guitar player/blues singer. Toby’s slide guitar playing was exceptional and a new live experience for me and Janie.
Then up to C for the play Let’s Talk About Porn. This was a verbatim theatre piece, performed in a physical style by a very young troupe. “Sadly” we didn’t see the dour bar-tenders at the upstairs bar, but we did grab some water and did see the Flamenco duo from the previous evening sitting around before and after the play.
The play was good; we’d seen a fair bit of material on this topic before but it was an innovative, thoughtful, physical and interesting piece.
Then home, where we fancied little food and no booze – so we relaxed with just some toast and juice. Daisy managed to set off the smoke alarm by burning some toast – mercifully those things switch them selves off quite quickly and it was still reasonably early when that happened!
All of our photographs from our week away, mostly at the Edinburgh Fringe, can be seen on our Flickr album by clicking here on the picture below:
