The usual New Year festivities were cancelled this year though some unofficial fireworking took place on Calton Hill at midnight on New Year's Eve.  Pretty extensive in fact and with some very loud bangs for half an hour or so.  The police must have decided in a spirit of hogmanay bonhomie to let it fizzle on and out rather than close it down.

The official celebrations took a different and beautiful form.  150 drones lifted off from a Highland location and made pretty pictures in the sky to the accompaniment of music and poetry.  The screenshot above is an example.  You may object that the Forth bridges are not Highland bridges and of course you are right.  The patterns were woven up north but some were superimposed on equally beautiful filming of Edinburgh and the bridges where drones buzzing around would have contravened who knows how many byelaws and regulations.

I don't know how long the videos will remain on the web but it really is worth taking a look at the display and the fascinating little "behind the scenes" video.  Click here and prepare to wonder.

Earlier in the evening with my theatre viewing chums I watched Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art.  It's a play within a play structure that portrays the (fictional) meeting of W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten after a twenty five year rancorous gap.  Wikipedia covers all the bases in explaining the plot, the themes dealt with and the critical reception both of the original production in 2009 and of this 2018 revival.  I suppose I was entertained but I wasn't overly enthusiastic, probably because none of the themes particularly engage me.

I'm hard to please but easily moved by sentimentality of which there was none and which is also scarce so far in Mad Men, the first three seasons of which I received as a Christmas gift.

I've finished the first season and am warming to the show.  I found it very difficult to enjoy earlier on because I despise almost every character.  Their attitudes and behaviour are awful and I'm dismayed to think that they were tolerated even encouraged in the bad old days around 1960.  Then in my teens I was oblivious to it, but maybe Madison Avenue's habits were not mirrored in Kirkcaldy.  Nonetheless the series is getting a grip on me. 

There's been a little snow around and on one snowy morning I went out for a stroll, camera in hand looking for some snappable views.  The streets were fairly empty as I walked through the New Town towards Canonmills and I loved this gate with its built in address.  Alas it's now known prosaically as 35 and 37 Rodney Street and no art or craftsmanship has been deployed in informing us of that fact.

But more people were around as I took the route from Canonmills (where the fruit and veg shop, the friendly cafe and other little businesses have been obliterated in favour of yet another character free block of flats) by the river towards Warriston and St Mark's Park.

The reason was obvious as I got closer, lovely snowy sledging slopes covered in kids enjoying themselves while groups of their adult handlers stood around chatting.  I narrowly avoided being swept off my feet by one young lady bombing her way across my path towards the Water of Leith.  She managed to stop in a flurry of snow and apologies a lot further short of it than another youngster I watched who ended up inches from the edge.   

I threaded my way through the happy throng to encounter more people coming into the park from the other direction.  I hope for their sake and mine that they were all free from infection.