Edinburgh's Leaders

Embra cooncillors: What can we replace this monstrosity with?

    

                                                How about this....?

 

The Eeriness of Rose Street

Edinburgh's Rose Street, just after 11.00am on Sunday. Usually this place would be bustling with shoppers, diners, tourists et al. I am reliably informed there are a couple of bookies there along with the odd pub or two...Instead, it looked an eerie place, symbolic of a lockdown that has now gone on for more than three months.

Tomorrow, in Scotland, roadside shops re-open, subject to appropriate social distancing measures being in place. Indeed, on adjacent Princes Street, many stores had staff working today preparing for re-opening tomorrow and several shops had two metre distancing signs marked on the pavement outside.

Tomorrow will mark another step towards something approaching normality in Scotland. Today, in central Edinburgh at least, it was the calm before the storm.

Lockdown in Edinburgh - A Sunny Mid-Morning

The usually bustling Royal Mile

A deserted Princes Street

Waverley Bridge - not a tourist bus in sight

The Neighbourhood Ain't Bad

The Auld Reekie Ranter and she-who-must-be-obeyed aka Marion moved house recently. It's farewell to Leith and hello to Abbey Lane, in the heart of Scotland's capital. We're just a few yards away from these scenes:

The neighbours were in this afternoon. Stick the kettle on, Brenda...

We're lucky to have such a stunning environment on our doorstep.  

Be Afraid...

...the Auld Reekie Ranter may return in 2019. You have been warned...

River Life Restaurant

It’s that time of the year when dining out becomes a necessity as workers across the country take time out to celebrate Christmas and New Year. However, if you’re like me and are becoming weary of the relentless festive fayre and yearn for something a little different then I can heartily recommend River Life, a French Caribbean restaurant in Edinburgh’s Dalry Road.

My office colleagues and I went there last Wednesday evening for our Christmas dinner and while admittedly some of us had reservations about opting for a non-traditional Christmas meal – we could have chosen the restaurant’s Christmas menu but decided to do something different - it was a decision which proved to be an excellent choice.

The feeling of satisfaction began even before we started to dine. We were greeted warmly by staff who thanked us for dining there and hoped we would enjoy the food.

The menu was a wide range of exciting and evocative French Caribbean dishes from the Island of Guadeloupe. I had the pork liver parfait, slow-cooked and browned pork fusion with rice then finished off with the sumptuous brandy crème brulee.

The other options on the menu looked equally tempting and all of my colleagues related they thoroughly enjoyed their meals.

All in all it was a very enjoyable experience. The food was sublime, the service excellent and the result was a group of very satisfied customers. If you visit River Life I’m pretty sure you’ll be satisfied too.

Edinburgh - My City

Late Monday afternoon. It had been a very busy day in the office, one of those days when one wished that Alexander Graham Bell, a Scot of some distinction, hadn't bothered inventing the telephone. The damn contraption hadn't stopped ringing all day...

Being a Monday the general mood of my colleagues and I was down in any case. It didn't help that it was a typical July day in Edinburgh - damp, dreich and grey. It also didn't help that, while I left the office early just after 4.00pm, the reason for this was a visit to the dentist to get a filling replaced. Ochone, ochone as Angus Og used to say.

I usually abort my attempt to board a tram at Bankhead any time after 5.00pm. I read in the news the other day that passenger numbers at Edinburgh Airport topped one million last year. I think they all get on the tram I try to get on after a hard day's graft...

However on Monday, having left the office early for the trip to get my filling replaced, I did manage to squeeze on to a tram - not only that but I managed to get a seat. I was seated next to a lovely lady and her two toddlers in a buggy made for two. We immediately began chatting - this, after one of said toddlers whacked me on the shin with his boot - and, after apologising for her youngster's act of random violence (oh, don't worry about it, the blood stain on my new suit will soon be removed with a spot of dry cleaning) her Australian accent told me she was in Scotland for the first time.

Now alongside the tourists and weary air travellers, the tram was full of grim-faced locals glad that the first day of the working week had been put to bed. However, this lovely lady from Perth - Western Australia that is, not Perth in Scotland - was a positive ray of sunshine. As the tram trundled through the streets of Scotland's capital city, she was genuinely in awe of the city's buildings, scenery and sheer beauty which many of we locals can take for granted.

She gasped delight as the tram snaked its way past Murrayfield Stadium and through the Haymarket. Most of us are usually gasping for breath rather than with delight by the time we reach the Haymarket as we empathise with how sardines must feel. But this delightful lady was clearly thrilled at being in Edinburgh and seeing some of its treasures. As the tram eventually headed on to Princes Street she gazed at Edinburgh Castle in astonishment and marvelled at the gardens and shops.

She told me how lucky I was to be living in such a beautiful and vibrant city. And do you know something? She is absolutely right. As she departed at St, Andrew's Square she thanked me although quite what for I wasn't sure. It should have been me thanking her, not only for her charming company, but for making me feel so proud of Scotland's magnificent capital.

Yes, Edinburgh has its faults just as every other city does. And the trams have become something of a routine for stand up comics (stand up being the words given how difficult it can be to get a seat on the damned things during rush-hour times) But it has always been - and always will be - a magnificent city, Majestic, beautiful, vibrant - just wondrous. It certainly thrilled the Australian visitor.

So if you're heading to work tomorrow and contemplating another day of hard graft think, for a moment, about this incredible place. Scotland's jewel in its crown.  Edinburgh. A city to be immensely proud of.

I know I am.

Suspicious Minds

The other day the present Mrs Smith and I staggered out of the gym at Edinburgh’s Ocean Terminal (yes, dear reader, the gym – despite what my daughters may tell you, I’m not quite ready yet for the knacker’s yard) and slumped on to the escalator of a well-known department store. As we shuffled our aching limbs through the shop we noticed what we thought was a suspicious package. There was a haversack which looked like it had been placed underneath a fold-up table. There was no one there and it certainly didn’t appear to have just been dropped there by accident.

I’m a naturally cautious kind of fella so I had my concerns in any case but in the wake of recent events in Tunisia, I felt I just had to point this out to a member of the store’s staff. I walked more briskly than was good for me, given my preceding hour at said gym, to a cash point and told the woman behind the counter.

‘It may be nothing,’ I began a little hesitantly, ‘but I think someone may have left their bag over there’

‘Where about, sir?’ asked the shop assistant with a note of concern. I led her to where the bag was and explained that I didn’t take it round personally as you never knew these days what was lying around and one couldn’t be too careful.

She saw the offending haversack and I was a little taken aback when she bent down and lifted it from under the table. ‘Shouldn’t you call security first?’ I asked, sorely tempted to bolt for the door in case there was an explosion – not that I would have got very far given my physical weariness. She smiled and showed me the tag which was attached to the bag – it was a price tag. The haversack was for sale and the reason it was underneath a picnic table was because it was part of a summer display – alongside a picnic basket, summer chair and parasol…

In the words of Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter from television’s Only Fools and Horses, I felt a right plonker. However, to her great credit, the store assistant told me I had nothing to be embarrassed about and, in fact, she wished more people were as wary as I. She added that staff had been trained to deal with such situations and she had a hunch my ‘suspicious package’ had been part of the shop display but had to check it out in any case.

The redness from my face had only recently faded after my hour of purgatory at the gym but now it had returned with a much deeper shade. However, recent events may well have turned more than just me into looking about them and wondering if there is any risk to what is, in reality, something completely innocent.

Until the last Friday in June, no one expected to go abroad for a week or two in the sun and expect to be mowed down by a terrorist when all they were doing was lying on a beach. Since the events of September 2001 in the United States of America, airport security can be a complex and lengthy affair and most of us accept this as part of the mechanism of holidaying abroad. Nonetheless, most of us expect to be safe when we reach our destination and the massacre of innocent people in Tunisia at the end of June was a callous reminder that we can no longer feel secure no matter where we are in the world.

This fear has created a climate of suspicion even in my adopted home town of Leith. Now I’m a Hearts supporter and, therefore, a Jambo abroad so I’m prone to suspicious looks anyway. But the spectre of terrorism was felt in Leith in April last year when bomb disposal officers removed suspect material from Persevere Court which followed a similar incident in Muirhouse a few days earlier. A former doctor from Syria, Faris al-Khori, was jailed for more than three years after being suspected of making bombs at his Edinburgh addresses.

Now it seems that everyone is under suspicion - by everyone else. Caution and wariness loom like unwanted intruders. On my way home from said gym tonight, I was concerned to see a police officer patrolling the beat outside Ocean Terminal. My immediate reaction was something was wrong. But it wasn’t too many years back when bobbies on the beat were part and parcel of life in Scotland. Nowadays they appear from nowhere in patrol cars with sirens screaming and lights flashing. When police officers are walking the streets, it’s quite often after an ‘incident’ with the police opting for ‘an increased presence to reassure the locals’.

Perhaps an increased police presence would help to partly alleviate this climate of suspicion, this constant feeling of wariness and doubting anyone who seems to be acting differently from the rest of us.

It’s a sad reflection of life. But, sadly, it’s the way of a troubled world in 2015, when even a delightful shop display aimed at attracting customers can cause alarm.

Summer Time And...

At last summer appears to have arrived. Edinburgh basked in warm temperatures today so the Ranter took to the sun. It doesn't happen too often...

Leith, looking down from Calton Hill, across the Firth of Forth to Fife (try saying that after a few Drambuies...)

Youngest grandson Max had his first visit to the beach - and his first ice cream cone. Do you want hundreds and thousands, sir? No thanks - just the one...

Doesn't seem five minutes since I took Michaela in her buggy to Portobello beach. Where does time go?

Small footsteps in the sand...

George Clooney wanders into shot (there's always one...)

When the Roof Fell in at Tynecastle

                                Photo: www.killiefc.com

As the football season approaches its finale, the Auld Reekie Ranter recalls one last day of the season scenario which occurred fifty years ago today. It was one of the most notorious results inflicted on Heart of Midlothian – and at Tynecastle too.

On 24 April 1965 Kilmarnock visited Gorgie for the final league game of season 1964/65. Normally such a fixture would have been a routine end of season affair with little at stake. However, in this particular season, this was a game the television companies of today could only have dreamt about. For Hearts were top of the league - two points ahead of second-placed Killie in the days when just two points were awarded for a win. The Maroons required just a single point to clinch their third league title in seven years even though it was generally accepted Hearts best years, the all-conquering era of the 1950s, were behind them. Indeed, Hearts could even afford to lose the game as long as it was just by a single goal. At that time goal average rather than goal difference was used to decide the winner if teams were level on points.

More than 37,000 fans packed into Tynecastle to witness history. Hearts, managed by the legendary Tommy Walker, the man who brought so much success to Gorgie in the 1950s, began like they were the team who needed to win by two clear goals. For the opening half an hour they were camped inside the Killie half. They recorded seven corner kicks to the visitor’s one. After only six minutes, Roald Jensen burst through between two Killie defenders and shot for goal. To the agony of the Norwegian, his team mates and the home crowd, his shot smacked off the post.

Hearts were creating chances in a game they didn’t really need to but such was Walker’s philosophy, the need to entertain the paying customer was the raison d’etre for playing the game. It was this spirit of adventure which had brought trophy after trophy to Tynecastle in the preceding decade. But this was now the 1960s and the importance of not losing games was taking precedence over winning and entertaining. On the half hour mark a goal finally did arrive – for Kilmarnock. Davie Sneddon was left all on his own some to head home Tommy McLean’s cross  - the same Tommy McLean who, nearly 30 years later, would become Hearts manager.

Tynecastle was stunned. A feeling of disbelief enveloped the old ground. And while it did, just 60 seconds later, Killie, incredibly, scored the crucial second goal when Black beat Alan Anderson before passing to Brian McIlroy. His low shot flew past Hearts keeper Jim Cruickshank and into the net.

Disbelief had now turned into the stuff of nightmares for Hearts. But they knew that even one goal would still mean they would win the league even if it meant a 2-1 defeat. They laid siege to the Killie goal before half-time but couldn’t find the all-important breakthrough.

It was the same story in the second half. Kilmarnock repelled Hearts incessant attacks. With just seconds remaining and Killie looking like they would hang on for the title, Hearts Roy Barry burst through the defence and passed the ball to Alan Gordon. The striker hit a powerful effort which looked a goal – and, therefore, the league flag – all the way. However, Killie keeper Ferguson threw himself across his goal and tipped the ball wide for a corner. The Hearts players held their heads in their hands. Seconds later, it was all over. Hearts had lost 2-0 and thereby handed the league title to Kilmarnock by 0.42 of a goal – the tightest finish to a league title race in Scottish football history.

Many point to this game as being the one which signalled a decline in Hearts fortunes thereafter which would culminate in relegation in 1977. Tommy Walker remained as manager for 18 months before leaving Tynecastle. Many supporters, dismayed by the decline in their once great club, never returned.

Many of today’s generation of Hearts supporters still recoil in horror the events of another final day of the season calamity when Hearts lost the league title in the final eight minutes of the 1985/86 season at Dundee. The newspapers of that day looked back to 1965 and asked if history could repeat itself. Sadly, it did.

The pain of 1986 will never leave this Hearts supporter. For those Hearts fans who suffered both calamities, 24 April 1965 will never leave either.

Shocking Incident at Edinburgh Zoo

Give Me Some Space

The magnificent Edinburgh Festival may be over for another year but the crowds in Scotland’s beautiful capital city are a constant feature. Which makes travelling on public transport in Auld Reekie an ideal subject for a rant.

Long gone are the days when you could sit on the top deck of a bus and gaze wistfully in peaceful tranquillity at the world go by. The world is a much smaller place than the one I grew up in as a child of the 1970s. Scotland is now a multi-cultural country and is a much better place for being so. Moreover, there is a trait which seems to bind all nations and cultures together - that symbol of 21^st century living, namely the mobile phone. Like the vast majority of the people of the western world, I have one (in the unlikely event of anyone from Orange reading this, can you please consider changing your policy of putting so many obstacles in front of customers who wish to upgrade their phones? I won’t bore you with the details but this is likely to be the subject of another rant in the very near future) but I suspect I’m not alone in thinking fondly of the time when we lived without them.

It seems no matter what nationality, language or culture people in Edinburgh are or have, the behaviour whilst using a mobile phone is the same. That is having a loud, intrusive ring tone, and speaking way too loud to the person on the other end. Local ned types tend to bawl ‘Hullo? Aye, ah’m oan the bus. Ah’m just oan ma way roond the now’ while well-dressed smartarses with laptops and handbags large enough to contain a week’s shopping for a family of four tend to spout office talk such as ‘Hey, it’s Anna, yeah, I’m just heading back to the office. Going forward, I need you to get that report finished by close of business tonight’ (going forward appears to be the new buzzwords in businesses these days, as if people feel the need to demonstrate they’re not going backwards)

Other nationalities have similar traits. It would seem the universal answering of the mobile phone is ‘Allo’ but people of Chinese, Asian and African descent all use the same behaviour as Europeans - no matter what language they use, they talk loudly with no respect for other people’s right to have a bit of peace and quiet.

And another thing - fat people. Or, to use another 21^st century buzzword - obese. Now it’s easy to pigeonhole obese people and believe they all eat far too much fatty fried food and are too lazy to cook nutritional meals and take physical exercise. And, being brutally honest, I probably fall into that category myself. Some people do have medical conditions and I understand that. However, no matter the reason for some people being the size they are, they have no excuse for thinking they have the right to take up two seats on the bus. I’ve been squeezed, squashed, crushed and nearly suffocated by fat obese people on the bus as well as having people whacking me with bags, rucksacks and dozens of carrier bags crammed full of frozen pizzas, chips and crisps. In the name of the wee man why the hell don’t some people look where they’re going. Going forward has responsibilities…

At least now I’m living in Leith, I have just a short walk to the Ocean Terminal shopping centre with no need for buses. However, the crowds there still hug their mobile phones, barge past without a thought for others and generally don’t look where they’re going. If some pedestrians drove their cars the same erratic way they walk in shopping centres there would be carnage on the roads. My mood during my last visit to Ocean Terminal last weekend wasn’t helped when I popped into Waterstone’s. While pleased to see my book Hearts Greatest Games on display the note underneath the book read ‘For the few Hearts fans in Leith’. Methinks their sales pitch could be improved…

I’m heading over to see my grandchildren later today on the interminable route that is Lothian Buses number 3. I’ll have the headphones of my Ipod lodged in my lugholes in an attempt to block out the ‘hullo, I’m on the bus’ in a dozen different languages. However, there’s bound to be Mr or Mrs Obesity waddle on to the bus with twenty carrier bags from Farmfoods. And, inevitably, they’ll sit next to me.

I may be gone some time…

Edinburgh's Disgrace

Ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you I love Edinburgh. They'll probably say I tend to go on at some length about how beautiful Scotland's capital city is and how it is such an exciting, vibrant city to work and live in, particularly at this time of the year when the Edinburgh International Arts Festival and Fringe is in full swing. However, the reputation of this fine city is consistently tarnished by a group of individuals whose actions - or lack of action - turn Edinburgh into something of a laughing stock. Step forward the City of Edinburgh Council.

What started out as long ago as 1999 as a forward-thinking proposal to reintroduce trams into the capital has turned into a fiasco. In fact, such a farce may well have scooped an award at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival.

The original plan was to build a tram line from the city's airport through the west end, to the Haymarket then along Princes Street and Leith Walk to Ocean Terminal and Newhaven pier. Following years of transport studies in Edinburgh, two bills were submitted to the Scottish Parliament to reintroduce a tram network to Edinburgh and both bills were passed in March 2006. We were told public transport in Edinburgh would be revolutionised and while there would be considerable upheaval as much of the city centre would be dug up to accommodate the installation of tramlines etc, it would be worth the inconvenience as by 2011 the trams would be up and running. Inevitably, as with the Scottish Parliament Building in Holyrood, the estimated cost of the trams project  - initial costs for the scheme were £498 million, with £375 million funding from the Scottish Government and £45 million by Edinburgh council - was millions of pounds out with costs spiralling with each passing year.

In April 2009, Phase 1b of the tram construction project was cancelled due to financial problems. The Scottish Government said the project would continue but no more public money would be given. Later, it was announced that trams would no longer be going down Leith Walk and would instead terminate at St. Andrew Square in the city centre - much to the chagrin of shop and business owners in Leith who had endured months of roadworks and traffic diversions thus affecting business, ultimately for nothing.

Last week the City of Edinburgh Council, having given serious consideration to cancelling the project altogether, announced that the trams would now only run from the airport to the city's Haymarket - stopping short of Princes Street and St. Andrew Square. The cost is now being estimated at £715m. This despite the fact tramlines have been installed in Princes Street for two years now.

The Council's latest decision beggars belief. How many visitors to Edinburgh will take a tram from the airport and get off at the Haymarket - a good ten minute walk from Princes Street? Very few I would wager, particularly as there is already a very good bus service on that route which carries on to Princes Street and Waverley Bridge taking just 25 minutes from the airport. It is another ridiculous decision by the people who run Scotland's top city.

On Edinburgh's Calton Hill sits the partially completed National Monument, the building of which was started in 1826 and was meant to to be a memorial to those who lost their lives in the Napoleonic Wars. It was never completed, partly due to a lack of funds and was labelled 'Edinburgh's Disgrace' - a moniker that has stuck ever since.

Nearly two hundred years later there is another use for this term. Not so much for the ill-fated tram system the good citizens of Auld Reekie have been promised for more than a decade. It's more the case that Edinburgh's Disgrace of the 21st Century can be found in the council chambers....

Edinburgh

Last Saturday I took my five year old grandson Jack to watch the mighty Heart of Midlothian Football Club for the first time. I don't think he was overly impressed so by way of compensation, I took him up Edinburgh's Arthur's Seat the following day. It was a beautiful, sunny summer's day - perfect for letting the laddo see what a magnificent place Edinburgh is. I've mentioned elsewhere in my ramblings how much I love Scotland's capital and how proud I am to be part of it. On a day like Sunday no other city can compare...

Running for Cover

Edinburgh. Early July. The middle of the local trades fortnight. Which can only mean one thing as far as the weather is concerned - rain. I met my mother for a bacon roll in Edinburgh's city centre today and while the calendar said it was July it may well have been October. Damp, misty, far from warm - in fact, it was dreich.

Now we're less than a month away from the start of the world's biggest and best arts and cultural festival so Auld Reekie is already full of tourists - not that Scotland's beautiful capital city is ever without visitors from near and far. The rain doesn't deter those visitors from venturing from their stylish hotels and bed and breakfast establishments (and Travelodge...) however it does mean the visiting hordes unleash that weapon of manners destruction - the umbrella.

In Scotland, when it rains many people either use A, an umbrella, or B, wear a hood. Now clearly these are not the only alternatives. Nor are they mutually exclusive. In the middle of Edinburgh today in the rain I had opted for option B. If everyone else had chosen the same option then this rant would not be on your screen, distracting you from your Facebook page/emails/porn. But they hadn’t. And herein lies the problem.

Ignorant, gormless and downright stupid people carrying umbrellas - let's call them tourists - put people at risk. How? Those damn metal spikes for one. Whose idea was it to put metal spikes on an implement designed to be held somewhere around eye level? (probably an Englishman) And does this implement cure cancer or help make hydrogen into a usable energy? Nope. It protects people from the sweet loving rain that waters our gardens, fields and allotments. Now if one had full visibility in a street chock-a-block with tourists wielding umbrellas then things might not be so bad. A little dicey perhaps, but I think we could keep the casualty figures down in the low teens if we all stayed alert.

An ever growing number of people with umbrellas simply don't think. Mr Overweight American Loudmouth and his equally overweight partner amble side by side along Edinburgh's North Bridge - 'Gee, ya see the castle, honey?' - with umbrellas the size of a small gazebo sticking out on to half the street. Do they move to allow us mere locals to get by and get on with our daily business? My arse, they do. Street etiquette is fast   disappearing in any case but people with umbrellas not only don't consider what injury they may inflict on their fellow pedestrian - they don't seem to care either.

There is always, of course, option B. The hood. It's a far more sensible and indeed practical way to protect your napper from getting wet while walking in a busy city street where metal spikes are constantly coming at you from all directions. And there's far less chance of forgetting to take your hood with you after you've had a pint or three in one of the multitude of Edinburgh pubs. How many folded umbrellas have been left in Edinburgh's drinking establishments, I wonder? Now I have been known, on occasion, to take an umbrella to work. But I like to think I am considerate whilst doing so and not so stupid as to leave it lying in some bar somewhere (by the way, if the office cleaner happens to read this don't throw it out, I forgot to take it home on Friday...)

So, next time you head out in the pouring rain - and in Scotland this is a far more regular occurrence than is necessary - and you decide to take your umbrella, please consider other people. Before you have their eye out...

Edinburgh

Some of the more observant readers to these pages will have spotted that I've changed the photograph on the front page of the blog.

This is Edinburgh when the buses were maroon and white and not the artistic atrocity they are now; when Princes Street was a street and not the building site it has become; when blue skies stretched over a once proud capital city.

Not so long ago, actually...

Grinding to a Halt

I love Edinburgh. It's a fantastic, vibrant, beautiful city and I'm proud to live here. But there is one drawback. Whenever something happens on the city by-pass, chaos ensues.

We've had two days of non-stop rain in Scotland's capital city. Now Scotland should be used to rain, even in August. In fact, particularly in August. You can stick your mortgage on the fact that when the Edinburgh Festival begins there will be heavy rain at some point during the three weeks. But the rainfall in the past forty-eight hours has obviously been too much for the city by-pass. There was flooding in parts of it this morning and at one point the road had to be closed. And, dear reader, you know what's coming next.

Traffic on the south side of the city ground to a halt. I work for an organisation which has flexi-time and I opted - foolishly as it turned out - to head for the slave galley (sorry, office) a bit later than usual. I left my house at 8.45 for the usually efficient Lothian Bus Service 3 from Mayfield. I arrived at the office just a few miles away at 11.40. Nearly three bloody hours to travel ten miles.

The knock-on effect from the partial closure of the by-pass was horrendous. There was a long, snaking queue of traffic all the way from the by-pass to Dalkeith where it just simply stopped. Nothing moved for the best part of half an hour and then eventually it inched its way along towards the south side of Edinburgh. When I got to the office, sarcastic cheers greeted my arrival. It was damn near lunch time. Two hours of my life had been given away to the nightmare of trying to travel from A to B in Scotland's capital city.

Can the city fathers do anything about it? Will they do anything about it?

Sadly, I fear not....

Magnificent Krakow

I had a fabulous weekend in Poland. Krakow is a wonderful city, a beautiful inspiring place. I arrived there early Friday afternoon and headed for the Salt Mines just outside the city. Saturday I went on a walking tour of the city centre which was wonderful and lasted nearly three hours. And on Sunday the most moving part of the weekend was the trip to Auschwitz Birkenau. That was truly a humbling experience. The guided tour there lasted the best part of four hours and I felt a lump in my throat on more than one occasion. That people can commit such awful atrocities to their fellow human beings is beyond comprehension.

Krakow is only two and a half hours flight away from Edinburgh and I'll likely return there at some point. Particularly as the local beer is only five Zloties - less than £2 - a pint! Although there was some rain on Saturday night, the weather on Sunday was sunny and hot - must have been close to 80 degrees.

One thing about the weekend though - and this perhaps shows my advancing years - is that I'm absolutely knackered! I don't think I've walked so much in three days in my entire life!

I can highly recommend Krakow with its magnificent historical buildings, great food and drink and friendly citizens. It's been a hidden gem for so long.