We have visited Edinburgh many times since Eldest Son (ES) moved there and increasingly frequently since he and his wife had a son there.  We have fallen in love with the city. 

I have always liked city living.  Jane is more of a rural lover.  I too have really enjoyed my several years of retirement in a comfortable home, out in the beautiful countryside of Gloucestershire and our lovely community in the Stroud valleys.  But now we are beginning to recognise that our current levels of mobility won’t be forever and that we need to plan for that.  Living in a town or, better, a city like Edinburgh, might be the solution.

We have spent a lot of time debating the options and it is a privilege to have those choices.  To help in the decision making, we spent a month from late January in Edinburgh.  All our previous visits to Edinburgh had been little more than long weekends.  This time we wanted to see how it felt to get a more profound and thorough feel for the city, and to think about how it might be to live in it for at least a substantial part of the year.

The month we spent in Edinburgh deepened our regard for it.  We managed to get to the cinema once and the pub a few times, but barely scratched the surface of the nightlife that is available.  However, I could already see that there is a lot going on and that I could resume my love of small-venue music gigs that absorbed me in the latter years of my working life in London.  It seemed clear too from a couple of visits to the local pub with ES’s parent-in-law, that making new friends wouldn’t be too hard.

In the event, I don’t think that we are closer to a decision about where our next couple of steps will take us in terms of where we live.  We continue to toss ideas around. 

I think that we have concluded two things.  First, that the model of hiring a flat in central Edinburgh for a month is one that we want to repeat (although the flat we stayed in this time was really good and set a high expectation for next time); we had a great time and I think the arrangements were helpful to ES and his wife without putting so much pressure on them to provide the hospitality. 

The second thing is that we want to keep a base in the Gloucestershire area so that we can stay close to Jane’s roots and the ones I have put down since we moved here, and be close to Middle Son, his fiancé and Second Grandchild.  Now we need to work out what that means.  Fortunately, we don’t have to make a decision immediately; to an extent, we can see how events unfold and influence things – goodness knows that recent world events have shown how quickly perspectives can change.

^{Our Rural Idyll – Different From Edinburgh But Not Too Shabby As A Location}

Regardless of all that, our winter Edinburgh month left us with a huge number of happy memories.

Best Solo Moments for me during this visit were those alone with First Grandchild (FG).  One was when Jane was rather immobilised with her broken arm, and I took FG out to a local park.  He played wonderfully considerately in the playground and then we went on a long walk during which we chatted incessantly.  I felt so proud of him .

The other, was when I was babysitting and putting FG to bed but couldn’t work out how to zip up his sleeping bag.  FG (like me) is a person who likes routine and I could see that he was struggling to manage his emotions about my zip incompetence and the impending break in routine.  Just as he visibly got control of those emotions, I finally worked out that the zip went downwards not upwards and we could celebrate together.

Best Moment with Jane was probably one of her earliest ventures out after her accident when we went to The Port of Leith Distillery for lunch.  This a building that stands alone amid demotion works On one side it overlooks the port and the Firth of Forth and, on the other, The Royal Yacht Britannia and the adjacent, drastic demolition and renovation of a chunk of Leith.  The views were great, the demolition work was entertaining to watch (for me, anyway), lunch and drinks were nice and going to Leith on the tram felt like a very positive step in Jane’s recovery.

Best Pub was Teuchters Bar & Bunker just over the road from where we were staying.  It has a great range of local beers, really good comfort food and a very convivial atmosphere.  ES’s father-in-law took me there a couple of times and he seemed to know everyone which led me to…..

….Most Embarrassing Moment was in Teuchters when, leaning back to meet yet another new acquaintance standing just behind me, I slid off my chair onto the floor.  I did say the beer was good! 

This just beat another embarrassing moment when I again fell on my backside.  This time I was blown over by the a gust of wind during the last vestiges of Storm Eowyn.  At least I fared better than a magpie that was also caught out by the gusty wind and died yards away having been blown against a building.

Best Bar: Spry, as usual.  We managed to get there almost every week.

Best Cinema: Everyman Cinema.  It was our first visit to an Everyman cinema that serves food and drink to you in the auditorium while you relax on their sofa-like seats.  I made two mistakes; first I didn’t understand the ordering system and needed to be prompted by the staff to indulge.  Then I unwisely chose their largest bottle of beer – daft if you need to sit through a two-hour film without a loo visit.  We saw the Dylan biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’ and really enjoyed the whole experience.

Best Toastie: The toastie I had at the aptly named Toast in Morningside Road was exceptional.  But for consistency over several visits, I’d recommend Cairngorm Coffee just up the road from where we stayed.  We even had a special Valentines Day orange flavoured toastie there.

Best Restaurant: We didn’t make it to as many as planned but taking our Edinburgh family to The Free Company, a farm and restaurant in the outskirts of Edinburgh on the edge of the Pentland Hills was a real treat.  FG behaved impeccably and did some good dancing on the way out that put my Dad-Dancing to shame. 

Best Museum was, of course, the National Museum of Scotland which we visit almost every time we are in Edinburgh.  However, for the first time, I also visited the Surgeons’ Hall Museum and enjoyed that.  This museum has several parts covering the origins, history and the future of surgery.  The section called the Wohl Pathology Museum was very impressive although, after 20 minutes of looking at exhibits showing deformed, vitamin-deficient skeletons and the results of cancer on internal organs, I felt a little squeamish and cut the visit short.

Correction.  I covered best art galleries, cathedrals and graveyards in earlier posts.  However, before moving on from Edinburgh posts, I should just correct a prior statement about there being two cathedrals in Edinburgh.  ES’s father-in-law corrected me and pointed out that there is also St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral nestled next to the new St James’s Shopping Centre and overlooking a plaza with modern and old statues.  For completeness, here it is…..

Maybe we will pop inside and have a closer look during our next Edinburgh visit.