Looking Out To Sea

When we moved into our flat on Leith Walk there was an arrangement with a man from Penicuik to get the stair cleaned. At each visit he’d post a bill through someone’s door, so each person only had to pay every eighth time. He’s stopped coming — in fact, he’s stopped business altogether — and he didn’t tell us. And because there was always a long gap between bills anyway it took a while to sink in that the stair was definitely getting dirtier.

At the weekend we sent round a note asking people to come in on Monday evening for a meeting to decide what we wanted to do. Helen had done some research and found prices for the council and for a local company to clean, and we were also willing to entertain a bucket-and-mop rota if that was the consensus.

Out of the 7 other flats we had one apology and two shows, which leaves four flats technically unaccounted for. Someone is apparently on holiday for 3 weeks, so that seems a reasonable excuse. Another were only just moving in that day so maybe they’re just snowed under. Overall I’m still annoyed by the lack of communication. As I guessed would happen, we settled on our preferred option. Of course now we have to get people to go along with this — to agree to paying regularly. If we can’t do that where are we? Whatever happens we lose if there are people who can’t be bothered — if the stair gets slowly more filthy that’s rubbish for everyone, but some care less than others; if some of us pay then we’re taking a bigger hit and others are free-loading; and if no-one wants to pay then people who care about the stairwell end up cleaning it themselves, when they can, while others look on. It may be worth noting that the people who bothered their arses this time round are the ones who own their flats.

(A similar issue can be found when you look at the garden. Who uses it? Who cares about it? Who weeds and tends it? Who has a lawnmower or can pay someone to trim the grass? This is made much harder because the dividing fence between our half of the garden and the half belonging to the adjacent tenement has been removed. It’s a bigger, nicer garden, but there are double the number of people to rope into any discussion.)

To help foster the impression that it’s not just me or Helen forcing the issue one of our neighbours is going to write up a wee note saying what we decided and who decided it. Once everyone knows what our decision was we have to work on getting the other tenants of the stair involved. Knocking on doors and such. It’s not the kind of thing I’m very good at or relish in particular but it has to be done and right now there is no real community here. I want to see if we can sort some of that out. Just starting with a core of two or three households that hold a common opinion, and working from there.

And that also leads onto the garden and the issue of the next tenement over. We need to make some friends there too — to even see some faces would be an incredible help. Last summer there were regular barbecues from the other tenement so maybe we’ll be able to build on that too.

I’m sure this is a recurrent problem. The renting tenants in the stair just seem to come and go, and we’ve recently lost two owners who had been for a long time, so we lost a lot of common understanding and knowledge in a short period of time. This happens all over the city, all over the country. But how, right now, do we deal with it?

On Friday I sped through to Glasgow with my green jumper to meet Helen and see Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra play at the art school venue.

Efrim was quite talkative — and Glasgow was naturally talkative back — and he even told us exactly what they were going to play before each piece. Nice! Of course that doesn’t mean I can remember everything they did. I guess:

• I Built Myself a Metal Bird, I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds
• God Bless Our Dead Marines
• 1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound
• ‘Piphany Rambler
• There is a Light
• 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons

The ordering is probably not right but that’s how it felt at the time. I enjoyed it all, though I wish I’d been more conscientious about listening to the new album before we went.

There were a lot of big cameras in the audience, including one guy about two rows in front of me who basically spent the whole gig shooting. From the position he was standing, I think it’s this fellow here.

I’m not long back from Greener Leith’s latest evening community talk. This is the second event I’ve been to, held in the Kirkgate Community Centre at the foot of Leith Walk. Last month was about hedgerow foraging which was quite interesting — I bought the book! — but I haven’t really followed up on any of the notions it inspired. It is much easier to just buy the book…

Today they were continuing the food theme with a talk from Donald from the local convivium of the Slow Food movement. Last month’s talk was very well attended so it was quite embarrassing to realise that I was the only person in the room that wasn’t (a) a presenter or (b) on the Greener Leith organising committee. I was “the public”.

I don’t really have much to say about Slow Food as an organisation — they are bound up by some vague notion of anti–fast food but don’t define themselves particularly. Most of their members internationally are local food producers and independent farmers of one type or another. There are a lot of them, and they have a big meeting once every two years to celebrate their strange unity, but they are not really important for Leith.

Leith has not much in the way of wheat fields or cattle so the focus locally is obviously on the more urban concerns — local producers and retailers, and hooking them up with each other and the general public. Getting people to investigate the bakers rather than Tesco, and getting the local farmed produce into the hands of people who live in Edinburgh.

Since there were so few of us in the room it was just a chat rather than a presentation, and the presenter brought some small examples of local produce — a loaf of sourdough from the Manna House and some bottles of Stewart Brewery beers. We talked (well, they talked; I mostly listened) about local food issues and small ideas to change the way food is seen.

The most concrete, and actually quite interesting, idea that was mentioned was a Slow Food Table at the Leith Gala. Try to get as many people to contribute something to a table of food which people are encouraged to sit at and take time to eat. Provide a contrast to fast food served elsewhere at the gala. Maybe there will be more of this?

Of course the real problem with food, locally and in many urban areas, is that so many people have been disconnected from food for so long that, even if given a plentiful and cheap supply of good food, they don’t know what to do with it. Trying to bring together local professional chefs and schoolchildren has not met with much success. I have no real solutions to offer, other than to note that the people who sell fruit, vegetables, meat and fish must have some passion for it, and should be consulted. (Obviously I’m ignoring the supermarkets in this, but there are a fair number of “high street” food shops in Leith which fit the butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger archetype.)

Well, I have volunteered what I can and hopefully come June we’ll have a plan to put into execution for the Leith Gala.