We went up to Edinburgh, for our summer visit to Eldest Son and his family, in the middle of the latest English heatwave.  We left early to avoid the worst of the heat but saw our car’s temperature gauge indicate a steady climb in heat as we travelled through the Midlands and Lancashire.  Temperatures only leveled out at about 28 degrees Centigrade as we hit the hills and mountains of the edge of the Lake District and entered Scotland.

Then, as we approached Edinburgh from the south east, we noticed a low cloud over the Firth of Forth and, as we approached the city, this moved inland to envelop Arthurs Seat.  By the time we got into the city, the haar – a cold sea fog seemingly peculiar to Scotland’s east coast – had pushed the temperature down 10 degrees.  The haar cleared and the heat gradually returned but it was an interesting meteorological phenomenon providing a welcome break from recent heat.

Our exploits in Edinburgh over a long weekend were similar to those of previous short, summer visits.  ES and his wife provided excellent hospitality, especially the food, and the entertainment we offered the grandchildren was reciprocated with some very funny moments.  First Grandchild’s (FG’s) description of some sort of model of an erupting volcano at his nursery as ‘it was ridiculous actually’ was priceless.  Plus, his interest in the placement of traffic cones on bus shelters, parking signs and statues along our bus route to the National Museum was very amusing.

The National Museum of Scotland is a banker for entertaining small children and FG loves it.  We also paid a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens, as we almost always do with FG and his new sister.  The gardens look great at this time of year and the garden’s cafés and restaurants are excellent.

We had had to postpone this Edinburgh visit by a few weeks and I thought it would be too late to coincide with an exhibition of Joan Eardley work at the Modern Art Galleries of Scotland but I managed to catch it on its penultimate day. 

Over the last few years of visiting Scotland, I have come to love her paintings of land and seascapes created late in her short life in a small village on Scotland’s east coast.  There were a few such paintings on show – some of which I have seen before – and I found them as impressive as ever.  However, this show was an exhibition portraying work from all her life and I was less keen on the earlier items mainly painted in her then home in Glasgow. 

Also, Eardley’s works on show were mixed with a similar number of paintings by other artists that the curators believed were influences on her.  I liked several of these paintings but, frankly, the links to Eardley’s thinking seemed largely tenuous and I didn’t really ‘get’ the overall narrative that attempted to hold the whole exhibition together.  Nonetheless, the exhibition was free (albeit with a donation) and well worth seeing.

I slipped away from the hubbub of grandparenting on a couple of other occasions.  Once was to follow up on the extraordinary sight of seeing a tank rolling down the road outside ES and his wifes’ flat.  I wandered over to St Andrews Square, where the tank was headed, to see the Armed Forces Day celebrations there in case they would have been of interest to FG.  It turned out to be a bit of damp squib though; the tank appeared to be American (why? I wondered) and was one of only two significant military vehicles on show.  There was little other entertainment available. 

Much better was a tram trip out to Leith.  I love New Town Edinburgh where ES and his wife live but Leith is a refreshing change. 

_{Views of Leith}

The ostensible reason for going this time was to see up close the numerous huge yellow structures on the coast that we could see in the distance from ES’s flat.  Whilst I couldn’t get as close as I wanted, I did get a good view of them. 

They are the components for big windmills being constructed in the North Sea in the Inch Cape field near Angus to the north.  The cylindrical pieces are ‘minions’ and the larger, latticed towers are called ‘tripods’.  Nearby were some of the ships that will carry and install these.  It seems that Leith Port provides a changing range of interesting things to see – on our last visit it was accommodating a huge Tasmanian ferry that had been built in Finland that that had to wait for the harbour in Hobart to be made bigger! 

I strolled around Leith port and, since the weather was so nice, I skived off from grandfather duty for an extra 30 minutes to have a beer at Teuchters Landing, the sister bar to another in Edinburgh West End that we are very familiar with.  I sat on a bridge with my pint watching the world go by for a while; naughty but nice.

It takes pretty much a day to get there and a day to get back but our visits to Edinburgh are always so rewarding.  It’s lovely to see our family offshoot there.  We love to see how they are coping with two lovely kids, how those kids are developing, and such a cool capital city.