Here's my photo of the the tram works again with the 1904 version directly below for comparison. They fairly laid waste the street then but I suppose there wasn't much in the way of traffic to be accommodated.

Leaving aside the tower block I'm struck by how many of the earlier buildings remain to frame the shot.

The 1904 photo is reproduced with the permission of Edinburgh Public Libraries. The rest of the Leith series and many others are available at www.capitalcollections.org.uk

I thought I was finished with The Life of Brian but I discovered that when viewed with Internet Explorer 7 thumbnails were not expanding when left clicked. I traced the problem to some peculiarity of the host so I've moved it all again.

That function is OK on the new host but I'll have to run through the site to see if there is anything it objects to. I wonder how this one handles "porn".

Here's a photo I took in Leith Walk the other day to mirror a photograph taken from the same spot of tramlines being laid in 1904.

The old photo is here on www.capitalcollections.org.uk and is copyright. I've been a good little boy and asked for permission to copy it into this blog for comparison but that has not been forthcoming yet.

The modern photo is of preparations rather than the laying of the lines but when that gets going in 2010 or whenever I'll be out there snapping.

It's a great day for The Life of Brian. I've reached the millennium. There are a few inconsistencies with the presentation that I'd like to iron out but I shall resist the temptation to tinker and leave it alone till the autumn.

The summer focus has to be on golf.

I didn't panic but I filled my tank all the same so that I can get at least halfway to Dover, where there should still be supplies, if Scotland suffers a month long petrol shortage.

Wasn't it Alastair Darling who admitted that Northern Rock depositors were acting rationally when they rushed to withdraw their savings despite assurances from on high that all would be hunky-dory?

Going
Going
Gone

Sunset September 1998 somewhere in Syria

I've finished moving my website to its new home and have confirmed that my URLs now point to the new space.

I will get on with adding content as soon as I've got rid of the little translation job I'm doing for Patrick. He and his chums want to attract more English speaking sailors to a rally they organise so intend to create an English version of this website. I'm doing the words.

Will The Life of Brian get to the millennium before the Iles du Soleil sailors get to Afuã ?

I had some trouble with porn yesterday.

I was moving bits of my website to its new host. I found one page that simply wouldn't display after the move. I checked and re-checked that the appropriate files were there and that no links were misspelt etc etc. Eventually it dawned on me that it was probably the host's page filtering routine that had found something it didn't like. And indeed it proved to be the word "porn".

My old host didn't mind "porn" but wouldn't let you say "hotmail", although it tolerated "hot male".

What's porn doing on my website anyway? See for yourself here.

I've been reading a book recently about the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz as to which of them was the inventor of calculus. I shan't spoil the undoubted pleasure you would get from "The Calculus Wars" by Jason Bardi by so much as hinting at the answer but will share with you some of the incidental knowledge I gained.

While having fun in Paris Leibnitz reluctantly accepted an appointment as counsellor to the Duke of Hanover because he needed the money, and although he dragged his heels for a couple of years he eventually turned up in Hanover in 1676 and spent 40 years raking it in, working polymathically and enthusiastically on behalf of his boss and twice as hard in pursuit of his own intellectual interests.

One of the jobs he took on soon after his appointment was to write the history of his boss's family. His estimate was a couple of years work but in fact it was still incomplete when he died in 1716.

I often feel that my much slighter "Life of Brian" website is going the same way. I've now filled up all the free webspace I had and have been looking around for more. I've found what surely will be enough for me but of course I'm having to transfer all the data. That's not entirely straightforward even now that after a couple of days I've resolved various technical issues. But I have to change every single page in one way or another so it is not the work of an instant.

I'm taking the opportunity to get rid of the frame structure thus removing barriers to search engines, and to create links straight to every show and every year on the site directly from the first page.

Until I've copied it all to the new space The Life of Brian will be where it always has been but if you'd like a sneak preview click here . Be warned that some links are dead ends.

This is the view from the house I shared with other members of the 4.48 Psychosis company in Kelso at the weekend. It's also where our hopes of taking the show on to Inverness ended up.

But there is life after death. Most of the company are already embarked on another show and I'm reading plays in anticipation of 2009.

For a full debrief on the SCDA theatrical high jinks at Kelso see Plaything.

An irritating beeping noise early in the morning is bad enough but on the morning that the clocks have gone forward it's an hour worse.

That Sunday at 05.00 GMT my smoke alarm started to beep, but not to protect me from death by burning. There was no cloud of smoke. There was not so much as a wisp in evidence.

Once the brain had cranked into gear I decided that the backup battery (it's a mains connected gadget) was exhausted. I got up on a chair and struggled with the cover while generating a major crick in the neck. It was only an hour or so later once Connor had been roused that I remembered I had a step-ladder, well two actually.

No way could I see how to get it open to get at the battery and stop the infernal beep.

We discussed breaking it apart with a sledgehammer. I'll wait until I can inspect some like it to try to work out how to open it up. It doesn't seem to have the same mechanism as the ones I installed in Mountcastle. Fortunately I was out a lot that day.

On Monday I unsuccessfully looked for a similar alarm but mercy me it didn't beep until just before the electrical shops closed at 5pm. It beeped all night.

Tuesday morning it got too much for me and I started to dismantle the beast and at an early stage snipped some wires to give blissful silence. Once in pieces it was clear how it fitted together.

The next challenge was to find exactly the same model so that the base plate still attached to the mains didn't need to be removed. A combination of internet search and telephone enquiry led me to one in Abbeyhill and in a jiffy all was fixed.

I haven't blogged for a while because I've been learning Pirate. Why not have a go yourself.

It seems that I was so disconcerted on Wednesday that I failed to register Act 1 Scene 2. Reading the play in the bus I see that there (in scene 2 that is not in the bus) Viola gets filled in on the goings on in Illyria including the Orsino/Olivia situation. So the audience is not denied that vital information after all. Now I'm asking myself what scene 1 is there for. Cut it Gordon, cut it.

Nor are the former patrons of Ndebele denied their biltong. I learn from a notice in the window of their vacant premises that Findlays of Portobello have added biltong and boerworst to their 101 things a butcher can do with dead animals.

Ben has gone off to the Himalayas for a wee walk and is keeping a travel log. I added a link to my list a couple of weeks ago but forgot to point that out. It's worth a click, especially for the pictures.

A week without a post disappoints at least one of my regular readers so just for her here are the highlights of my last seven days.

On Saturday I attended a concert in St Mary's Cathedral (the pisky one) in celebration of Ronald Stevenson's 80th birthday. The composer was there but not too many chums had turned out, or was I just fooled by the vastness of the space. Anyway he'd surely have been pleased by Murray McLachlan's playing of his Passacaglia on DSCH.

This is a pretty astonishing piece - solo piano without a pause for one hour and twenty minutes that grips the listener throughout. Apart from needing the stamina required to play for that length of time various other demands are made of the pianist. Perhaps the most entertaining for the spectator is when the page-turner, seated on the pianist's left gets up, knocks the music stand down flat and runs round to his right while the pianist, continuing to play with his right hand leans into the body of the piano and thumps the strings vigorously in various rhythms with his left hand for a page or two.

Sunday saw our second rehearsal for the reprise of 4.48 Psychosis and the eagerly awaited first episode of Mad Men. As so often happens the hype belied the quality of the product, for me at any rate. Since I'm not often faced with a surfeit of entertainment at 10pm on a Sunday evening I may watch it again. On the other hand The Westminster Hour can be a thrilling bundle of fun. No hype for 4.48. In Kelso crowds will roll up for that on the basis of a solid track record.

On Monday I bolted down Connor's delicious paneer pot au feu and rushed off to a residents' association meeting due to take place in a local cafe as a result of our previous meeting arrangements having been judged of a lesser priority than toon cooncil business. But alack and alas some cock-up with keys kept the cafe closed and we repaired to the chairman's kitchen for a rapid romp through parking schemes, lift malfunctions, vandalism, repainting funds, defective locks - the usual exciting ephemera.

Scott's great skill as a chairman is always to draw the meeting to a close bang on 7.30 which left me enough time to get to the Queen's Hall by half way through the first movement of Beethoven's string trio opus something or other. I managed to slip in while the crowd cleared its collective throat between movements one and two. The trio was elegant and was elegantly played but I was happier in the second half. A piano was added to beef up the strings for a rattling good chunk of Dvorak. I pass over Kurtag's little miniatures that never seem to go anywhere.

More music on Tuesday - at lunchtime I went to one of the university's extremely good value concerts - is there better value than free? An engaging short piece by Janacek was followed by a stomping rendition of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The orchestrated versions are all very well but the original for piano alone doesn't need any help at all. It's one of my desert island discs.

My language sensibilities were intrigued by the fact that it was billed as Pictures IN rather than Pictures AT which is how I've always known it so I googled them both. AT wins hands down for the Mussorgsky piece but there is an IN, to wit Pictures in an exhibition by Death Cab for Cutie which is a very different kettle of fish. Listen to it and groan. There is also an AT by Emerson Lake and Palmer that is a rock version of Mussorksky's music with lyrics added. It's horrid.

I popped into the City Art Centre afterwards and admired Ansell Adams photographs, many of which I've been exposed to through the medium of calendars winging their way to me from the USA during Connor's sojourn there. There is an exhibition of political cartoons on as well that had me laughing out loud. My very particular favourite that might even be worth the £295 asking price features East Fife football strip burkas. I shan't spoil your fun by explaining why. Just go and see it.

Another very different kettle of fish cropped up that evening when I went with a number of Grads to Edinburgh Music Theatre's production of A Chorus Line. For some in the audience this was a chance to re-experience a well loved show/film but it was my first time. I shan't rush to re-experience. As a story it failed to interest, engage, move or excite me on any level and the music was musak.

The company however did a great job. They did the best they could to make it look interesting - hard with all that standing around in a long line in front of black drapes - and I failed to see the logic in sometimes having the practice "mirrors" visible and sometimes not but they got a good variety of groupings and interesting lighting effects. There was a lot of red but I don't really think I was grumpy about it. (see Play Thing).

The characterisations were all well judged. The acting was confident and sincere. None of the accents faltered even slightly. The costumes were excellent (notwithstanding the gents' baggy trousers in the finale which some people didn't like but which I didn't notice because I was concentrating on the girls). I loved the dancing, especially the finale and not being a pitch perfectionist the singing passed my muster without a stain on its character.

Choose a more interesting show next time please.

On Wednesday the Grads held their monthly meeting with the carrot of a reading of Twelfth Night (the autumn production to be) to encourage people to put up with the boring business stuff. Claire shares with Scott the desire to shoot through the agenda and despite a barely controlled bout of corpsing brought on by notification of an SCDA opportunity for younger people had it done and dusted just after eight.

Those with previous engagements bade farewell and we started the read. Fifteen lines into Act 1 Scene 1 Gordon interrupted to say we'll cut there and go on to scene 2. I confess to having been disconcerted. Was that just for this reading or does he intend to play it that way? If he does then the audience will not be told that Orsino is in love with Olivia and that she has rejected his overtures, a central element of the plot. Ah well!

After the reading I went home to sup on Connor's second culinary concoction of the week which had not matured (those pesky spuds) in time for me to eat before going out.

I had decided a while ago to go to the Citizen's production of Waiting for Godot and on Thursday set off to see the matinee performance. This was scheduled to be a cheap day out since I can travel to Glasgow by bus for nothing and the Citz charge only £6 for their matinees.

The bus I intended to catch pulled out dead on time, if not early, when I was about 50 yards short of its stance. No hassle, another will be along in 15 minutes. But that one was 15 minutes late so I arrived in Glasgow with so little time to spare that I decided I'd have to get a taxi - cost £5.20. I got to the theatre with ten minutes to spare to learn that the matinee had been cancelled. Should I just go away? Seems a shame having got here so I bought a ticket for the evening performance. That's £9 even for a wee concessionary like me so I'm now 135% over budget and naturally if I'm here all day I'll have to have some lunch.

I had in fact a very pleasant lunch (now 386% over budget) and did a bit of tourism. For the first time in my life I went into the cathedral. It's an absolutely splendid building and at least it is still there unlike many of the historic relics featured in a little tourist trail leaflet that I followed. I gazed in awe at the former sites of past wonders. What destructive planning ideologue allowed Britain's first music-hall to be torn down without even a brass plaque to mark the spot let alone a decent photograph and a recording of Harry Lauder singing "Stop yer ticklin jock"?

Back to the Gorbals for a coffee (413% over budget) and a great show. Gerry Mulgrew played one of the tramps and the play was even funnier than I remembered. I guess Glasgow accents and personalities are just that bit funnier than we are over here in the east.

So that's six of the last seven days. Today I finished reading "Utopia & other places" by Richard Eyre. It's an enjoyable read with good stories of his time at The Lyceum and at the Nottingham Playhouse. The book contains many thoughtful and useful aperçus for the actor and director.

And of course I wrote this post.

Coming home from a lovely meal at Telford College's Zero One restaurant the other night, made even lovelier by it being Nick's treat, I greeted an Indian gentleman who was leaving the ground floor for the basement as I approached the lift.

This is what met my eyes when the lift door opened. I stepped in and snapped then stepped back out of the lift whether to snap it from another angle or to ask the chap if he hadn't perhaps forgotten his chapattis I am not sure but the door closed and lift and contents vanished from view.

I jabbed at the button but the lift did not respond. It whirred on a journey up and down the shaft ignoring my persistent finger.

I could hear male and female sub-continental voices exchange incomprehensible remarks until silence fell broken by a descending whirr and a final clunk as the lift came to rest revealing only a trace of its former burden.


25kg of chapatti flour had disappeared in a mechanised form of Indian rope trick.

Collage of a happy holiday weekend near Cupar.

One gets used to miles of traffic cones on motorways with nothing very much in evidence to explain why they are there. Now this phenomenon has spread to the pavement in Princes Street.

Watch this space.

The team who swept to victory with 4.48 Psychosis on Saturday night. Does this garment belong to one of them or to one of their followers or has the litter lunatic penetrated as far as my bathroom?

Ndebele has closed down.

Ag pleez Deddy where will we get our biltong now? (with apologies to Jeremy Taylor).

This is the mini demo that met my eyes when I went to the City Chambers to sit in on the planning committee deliberations on the Caltongate development.

There has been a great deal of polemic over these plans. You can read the rosy view of the developers (don't miss the amazing movie) or the black views of the protestors or in search of undoubtedly partial but less visceral plaints see what the Cockburn Association has had to say.

Whatever you do you'll find it hard to make up your mind. Most of it is being built on the ground previously occupied by a bus depot. No loss there methinks. Some of it entails the demolition of existing buildings. This will go.
Built as an infant school in 1901 I wonder if there were protests about what had to be done away with to allow its construction? It's not a school now and I believe that provision is being made for its current functions to be carried on elsewhere in the area but still you'd like to think it might have been incorporated somewhere.

One of the more bizarre complaints I read in the comments in the on-line Scotsman was that Scotland's northern latitude dictated the need for wide streets and low buildings. Not I think a characteristic of Edinburgh's Old Town. Sydney Goodsir Smith called the Canongate a canyon not a boulevard.

In the three hours I attended there was a lot of discussion and some highly vocal protests from the public benches. "Money grabbing gits" or some similar remark met the approval of the sub-division of the planning application relating to the hotel.

The planning committee as a whole however had few doubts and voted most of it through. Next stop is referral to the Scottish Executive. What with Trump's golf course and this they'll be brought down to earth after yesterday's budget triumph.

Personally I like the overall ideas and the layout of the various elements but I'm not too keen on the look of the buildings. If we are going modern I'd prefer them to be more exciting, more daring, mould breaking - more Scottish Parliament than Victoria Quay.

Maybe they'll grow on me, if they ever get built.