Looking Out To Sea

Among the many advantages of no longer having a swollen infected toe is the ability to do sports again. I know, it doesn’t seem like me, but I have been known to do it in the past.

At the weekend Helen and I went an epic (miniature epic?) walk up the Water of Leith, from Bonnington to Juniper Green. This map shows the extent of the Water of Leith Walkway but we didn’t cover all of it. We started near the firth outlet, about halfway between Craigleith and the docks I think, and went to Juniper Green which is one of the yellow-marked waypoints. It was probably about 8 or 9 miles in total, uphill but mostly on a very slight incline and broken up by lots of down and flat bits.

We passed by the Water of Leith Visitor Centre (why does a river have a visitor centre? who knows) but it was closed. We saw a couple of herons like in the photo on the visitor centre website. I took my new camera and spent the day playing with different settings in Manual mode, trying to get a feel for how things turn out. I’m not confident but I’m much closer than I was, and I’m enjoying it greatly.

When we got to Juniper Green we had tea at Ristorante Al Borgo, which is owned and run by the parents of one of Helen’s colleagues. After a half day walking in serious heat it was a relief to hop on the bus and get back home again.

But that’s not the extent of the new, exercising, Dougal. Oh no! Near to the flat is the Out of the Blue arts centre, an ex-drill hall that’s been gutted and refurbished to include studio spaces, exhibition areas, a cafe and so on. We go to regular art fairs there and I’ve often seen a poster on the wall advertising their capoeira classes. Last night I popped over to the beginners class organised by the Mão no Chão. They were very friendly and the guest tutor was genial and enthusiastic in equal measure. The class lasted an hour longer than advertised: it should have been 8–9.30 so by the time I got home at 10.40 I was completely wiped out.

It was great fun though. I last did any capoeira about 8 years ago so some of the ideas seemed familiar but it’s not like falling off a bike. It can be forgotten!

I’ve just had to defrost the freezer again — just three months since the last defrost — and it’s currently humming away trying to get back down to temperature. This time it was dual-hairdryer action! We discovered the fridge compartment warm and the milk sour this morning. See the story in the previous post to learn why the fridge dies when the freezer is choked with ice.

I think the time between defrosts is so short now because the inside of the freezer, and in particular the refrigerator element, were still quite wet when I connected everything back up. In order to get everything properly dry it really needs to sit for 24 hours. But we don’t really have that luxury when there’s a freezer full of frozen food sitting on the floor wrapped only in towels.

So within the next month or so we’ll try to run the freezer down and, if necessary, have some kind of defrost party to use up random things which we can’t eat on our own.

A year ago we were at a wedding in Glasgow. Six months ago we were at a wedding in Milngavie. Obviously I needed an excuse to get a haircut again so I neatly arranged for my aunt to get married on the May Day weekend — cunning, eh? — and we went down for a great weekend on the south coast of England. My aunt Pamela and her family live in a little town near Worthing, only five minutes walk from the sea. They’ve been together for nearly as long as I’ve been alive but clearly decided it was worth getting this marriage thing done at some point! Their daughter said lots of people were asking whether she was happy to no longer be a bastard, which is a strange question if ever there was one. Does bastardry get removed retroactively? :-)

Unusually I was the only person there in a kilt, which was strange but quite enjoyable. I assumed there would be at least one other Scotsman there but apparently not. Stranger, though, was how unusual it seemed — it’s like the other guests had never seen anyone in a kilt before. Lots of people asked us “so are you Scottish?”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We flew down on Friday night from Glasgow because Helen was in class until 5pm. The train from Gatwick was easy though I couldn’t help being alarmed at the names of places we passed — are Lancing and Goring-by-Sea quaint villages or ways to die in battle? Pamela picked us up from the station and we stayed in their spare room for the duration of our visit.

On Saturday morning the house was transformed for the post-wedding reception. My mum and her other sisters and brother came in and everybody swept and mopped and made sandwiches and so on.

The ceremony at Worthing Registrar was in a fairly small modern room. The readings were lovely and the couple looked incredibly happy. Back at their house we drank champagne and the weather blessed us with a warm sunny afternoon. Stood in the garden talking nonsense to various people who wanted to know why I was wearing a kilt…

After the best man speech and the cutting of the cake and consumption of more sandwiches we all trooped out to a cafe on the beach front for a meal and live jazz and dancing. The food was excellent and the band really good too, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves.

We left at the same time as my mum who was driving back to the cottage they had hired in Arundel. I don’t know why we departed at that point but realised when we got back to the house we were staying at that the people with the keys were still chatting back at the party. We sat on a bench near the front door in the darkness, drinking whisky from a hipflask and enjoying the silence. It’s such a strange quiet place: no traffic, no street lights. Just darkness and silence.

Next day we sat round the kitchen table in the conservatory while the rain lashed the windows. Mid-afternoon it had died down a bit so a bunch of us trooped out to a restored 18th century windmill which was really good if you’re a bit of a nerd like me, though the weather was crap for it. They didn’t have any wind-milled flour in the visitor centre shop because it had all sold out. They only mill once or twice a year but clearly we arrived at just the wrong point.

In the evening Helen and I took the train into Brighton to see some friends who were also in the area for a few days. We forgot/left behind our phones so had to wait around in the cold at the arranged meeting point wondering “is this how things were done before mobile phones?” and being a bit miserable. The rain had stopped but the wind was bitter. Some guy was skinny-dipping in the sea beside the pier and quickly turned from pink to blue when he came back out. Then his friends — loose term — proceeded to slap him with his leather belt while he tried to get dressed again with numb hands. I don’t think I’d be sticking my neck out to suggest alcohol was involved.

There was a restaurant that came recommended (“English’s”) but was full so went next door. I think this place was called The Gallery. Food was quite nice though we did end up with a green-dye-swirled meringue as the base of the Pavlova. We later discovered that there is a Brighton shop which sells meringues swirled with a variety of dyes, though why they chose the St Patrick’s Day meringue to build a Pavlova around is anyone’s guess. Eating was made difficult through laughing at the colour.

We spent Monday back in Brighton again with our baggage this time. Absurdly enough, Brighton, tourist town that it is, has decided that left luggage is the work of the devil and they’ve removed every trace of it from the public facilities. We know this for certain because we asked at the bus station, the train station and the travel centre. This curtailed our day as we couldn’t really wander comfortably around with several bags of luggage. We cut our losses and went to Gatwick early. Checked everything in and had a nice meal at Cafe Rouge in the secure area while watching the board for our gate to open.

We got back to Edinburgh on time but sat on the runway for a while because our berth was being occupied by an EasyJet flight that wasn’t moving. Don’t know why. We got in eventually, though I didn’t mind because I had my book with me. Aeroplanes are much more comfortable on the ground, without the noise and the juddering and the earache. It helped that the plane was mostly empty.

There should be some photos of all this to come but they’ve not been sifted and cropped yet. I’ll put up a post later on with photos when they’re ready.

On Saturday afternoon I felt pretty crap with a cold but we went out to Pilrig Park just behind the flat to take part in the Pilrig Park Clean-up organised by Greener Leith.

We were given latex gloves and those trigger-operated litter pickers and as many black plastic bags as we could hope to have a use for, and went forth to clean up the park. This was our first time on a clean-up so we’ve learned a few things:

• It’s not a very sociable job as there’s generally several hundred metres between you and the nearest person. I wouldn’t say bringing an MP3 player was a bad idea
• Holding open a black plastic bag in a windy open field is quite tricky. I wonder how we might improvise some kind of hoop or holder to keep the neck of the bin bag open.
• The rich pickings are to be found in the perimeters of the park, amongst the trees and bushes.
• Glass bottles are a pain because they’re so heavy. Something like a wheelbarrow to cart them to the nearest recycling spot would have been great.

And yesterday Greener Leith organised a Leith Commuter Breakfast with free bacon rolls and bike tune-ups for people who commute in Leith on bike or foot. There was a lot of passing trade — many people cycle along the Water of Leith and were drawn in by cries of “free bacon roll!”.

I’m very grateful to Greener Leith for being so active and coming up with new ideas to bring people together. If you’re local have a look at their website and maybe join their social network.

For the first time this year we spent the weekend working and lounging in the garden. The sun was warm and the walls high enough to keep out the wind.

Over the autumn and winter the weeds have come in great force. What few plants were there have been choked. A series of scaffolders, builders and glaziers have made a real mess of the lawn and there’s rubble in the beds. The remains of two windows — frames, broken glass, weights and plaster — were dumped on a bed of herbs in one corner.

On Saturday Helen worked on taking out a large bramble and trying to discriminate plants from weeds. I fought with the gate, which had rusted and buckled hinges. I replaced the middle hinge and removed the bottom one without being able to properly replace it. The rusted hinge is stuck fast to the gatepost and every attempt I make on it just destroys the gatepost further. So at the moment it only has the top two of three hinges, which is a bit top-heavy.

On Sunday we got outside earlier and went to B&Q for gardening gloves and plants. There were no plants but I did get a neat little barbecue. And those gloves. Then we had lunch in the garden, with potato salad and mini scotch eggs and mini pork pies and sweet chilli-flavoured Ryvita bite-size crisps and assorted things. Ella and Ben came and we tracked the sun around the garden and talked of all sorts. It was nice and I hope there will be many more days like it this summer.

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?

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.

Last week I pulled some butter out of the fridge and thought it felt a bit soft. The temperature display inside the fridge said +5 which is the upper limit for most purposes, so I pressed the “cooler” button a couple of times so that it would aim at +2 degrees and forgot about it.

On Friday night it was definitely on +5 and feeling distinctly warm. There wasn’t much we could do about it at the time. We tried the IT support routine (turn it off, turn it back on again) and went to bed in the hope that things would have stabilised by the next day. On Saturday morning the milk had turned and it was about 6 degrees Celsius inside the fridge. Thankfully the freezer was operating as normal.

I was willing to go delving if need be but I tried doing some research first. The manual was basically useless but it did have the model number writ large so I could search for it.

The ADM6855 is a common fridge/freezer combined unit for fitted kitchens, and it has a design flaw. It’s a “parasite” design, whereby the cooling mechanism works on the freezer and a separate fan extracts cold air to cool the fridge when necessary. This suffers a similar problem to the vacuum cleaners of old — when the cooling elements get clogged with ice they don’t allow air to flow and so the fan is sucking on empty. The slow clogging of elements hides what’s happening until one day your butter’s all soft because there’s not enough cool air making it through. I imagine in its final moments the same suction through constricted airways causes the elements to freeze up even faster.

Anyway, that’s what happens, and that’s what I had to undo. As I said, it’s a design flaw so reversing the effect is not as simple as scraping ice off the inside of the freeze box. It’s not the kind of procedure you’re expected to perform at home, and there’s no mention in the user guide. I found some great instructions for the process, which basically involved a 48h defrost or some disassembly and hairdryer work on the frozen elements. I chose the latter because I wanted to get our frozen food out and back again before it all wasted.

Well I did the deed and the fridge has been operating at the desired temperature now for two days. We shall have to see how long it takes before this happens again. I don’t know if there’s anything in particular we can do to avoid the problem because we don’t know (1) what causes it; (2) whether it’s new or recurrent; (3) if it’s happened before, what date the previous owners dealt with it; and so on. We’ve been here 18 months now without issue, and I don’t think the previous owners will have defrosted the freezer just before they left. (Unless the fridge was turned off when we got here? I can’t remember, but I seem to recall they had left us a bottle of fizz in the fridge as a gift, so it must have been working.) We can’t even tell how quickly it’s frosting over again because it’s so deeply buried in the back of the freezer. I’m guessing some kind of airflow gauge inside the fridge would be able to tell if the fan was pulling in cool air or just sucking on empty. Next time we’ll know what to do, anyway.

I should also send an email to the writer of that guide for providing excellent instructions.

About a fortnight ago now I went into a chiropody clinic for some medical attention on my big toe. I’ve had a bothersome ingrown toenail for quite some time and eventually found a doctor who pointed me in the right direction for treatment. Thank you Dr Reiff-Musgrove.

I received a couple of injections to numb the area and then they went at my foot with little bolt-cutters. It was fascinating to watch (though not if you’re a bit squeamish) — cutting down into the nail to the nail bed and then using a poky-stick to fill the resulting wound with phenol to inhibit nail regrowth. With luck I should have a mostly-normal nail when it all heals, but without risk of the same thing recurring.

For a few days I had a huge cartoonish bandage wrapped round my big toe which meant wearing a sandal on that foot. This is a very cold way to dress in winter. More recently the toe has been redressed with neater coverings which allow me to wear shoes again. I’m still trying to wear shoes as little as possible though to reduce pressure on the affected area. Which ultimately means that I wear the dreaded socks-with-sandals übernerd combination at home in the evening. (You can ignore this image and continue to think of me in a velvet smoking jacket and slippers if that makes the nightmares go away.)

So far I’ve been delighted by the sudden loss of background pain, which I’ve been growing accustomed to for several years now. The site of the operation still looks pretty horrible but it’s not painful. I can walk again to some degree, though I think it will be some time before I can don a pair of walking boots and go into the hills. I had intended to document the healing process with the camera but as the toe spends most of its time in bandages that’s proven quite difficult.

I look forward to doing all the usual feet related activities — like buying shoes that fit, ceilidhing without pain and wearing sandals without fear of frightening small children.

Last week we pulled out the Mathematics Notes book from secondary school¹. This was the book in which we had to write all the definitions and meanings for what we learned; and it had to be written in ink, for some reason that escapes me now.

Can you remember the formula for the volume of a sphere? Could you derive it if you had to? I’m happy to say I remembered it but I haven’t had a go at pulling it together from first principles. It’s all that integration, innit?

If you had kids in ten or twenty years’ time that were learning this stuff do you think you could help them with their homework?