La Tour Eiffel - view from the top

Still processing pictures and some video from the brilliant Paris trip; there's about 300-odd pictures up on the Woolamaloo Flickr already (there you can click on the 'all sizes' button to see the full size versions, handy for detail on some of the aerial shots of the city) and I still have a number to sort and upload. Today though I uploaded some video clips I shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower. We walked up the first two levels - you can take stairs or the lift up the legs, so we opted to walk up just because hey, we can say we did! Final segment is by lift only and they run up the main central spire of the tower. The views, as you can imagine, are amazing - the whole of the City of Light spread out below you. The first one, looking north, is more than a little windy!



When we got to the west facing side we noticed a football match going on at a sports ground below - from this height it looked like a Subutteo game! Talk about grandstand seating...



Out of the wind on the south facing side looking down into the Parc des Champs and the Ecole Militaire with the Montparnasse Tower in the distance (an ugly modern building which most Parisians hate, but apparently gives great views of the Eiffel Tower from the top of it and if you are in it you don't see the ugliness of the modern tower, which is very out of keeping with the rest of its area), then pan round towards the Latin Quarter and Les Jardins de Luxembourg (which our hotel was next to) and the Pantheon (which has more than a passing resemblance to the front of St Paul's):




And of course a quick view looking Eastwards along the Seine towards Les Invalides and further in the distance Notre Dame:

And more Paris

I'm still beavering away processing and uploading pics of the Paris trip to my Flickr site - 184 up and I still have a ton to go, not even got as far as the Eiffel Tower pics yet. I was going to post a few of the ones I had one on here but blogger is arseing around and for some reason just not uploading images, although it seems happy to post video... So until it lets me put some more pics up and I get round to doing more pics on Flickr, here's another short video panorama of the Louvre, this time taken from the gardens between the wings and the famous Tullieres. As it turns round you get to see the Eiffel Tower in the distance over the top of one wing of the Louvre.



Darn it, I miss Paris, although it has to be said when you live in a city like Edinburgh having to leave Paris to go home isn't quite such a blow. I was suffering some withdrawal pangs though so towards the end of last week I wandered down to Haymarket not too far from me and into La March Francais, a French deli/cafe which fills up wine bottle right from the barrels and corks them then and there for a very reasonable rate and then parked my Magnificent Celtic Arse - or perhaps Le Derriere Celtic tre Magnifique - down for coffee and a read of my BD (Bandes Dessinee, basically comics and graphic novels) journal and felt much better. Why aren't I extremely rich so I could just keep an apartment in Paris and flit back and forth between there and Edinburgh whenever I felt like it? Real life, pah! Mind you, if I did I would need to import some Linda McCartney's since trying to eat veggie in Paris is a nightmare...

This time last week...

... I was walking round the Louvre... sigh...

Birds and lighthouses...

... down on the beach near Yellowcraig, as dusk falls and a flock of birds fly over and the Fidra Lighthouse comes to life...

Stephen Fry's Podgrams

The national treasure we call Stephen Fry has progressed from starting his own blog to now doing a Podgram - essentially a podcast in MPEG-4 format as opposed to an MP3 so there is video as well.

And suddenly there were canoes in Edinburgh

Heading up to Mel's to take care of Dizzy, the incredibly pretty kitty, close to sunset I paused on the bridge which crosses the Union Canal. It's always worth stopping for a moment there because sometimes you see something nice sandwhiched in between the Victorian tenements; sometimes ducks, geese or swans, sometimes just the sun reflecting off the water or, as in today's case, a group of canoeists paddling past. I guess they were making the most of an unseasonably mild and very clear, sunny day which was more like very early spring rather than early February in Scotland. Isn't it nice the things you can just come across walking round your neighbourhood? (click the pics to see the bigger versions on the Woolamaloo Flickr)

Marching band Tetris

I pinched this from my mate Olly:

The iron road to the Highlands

Early yesterday morning I caught the train for Inverness to cover a brand-new comics convention for the FPI blog. Crossing over the mighty Forth Bridge (I can't remember going over that since I was a kid, usually I'm going over the nearby road bridge) the train went along the Fife coast to begin with, curving around past Burntisland, giving great views right across the Firth of Forth where you could see all of Edinburgh in profile, the Pentland Hills behind the city dusted with snow and an orange glow behind them as the early morning winter sun struggled to rise above the hills. As the train turned further inland the rolling hills of Fife were sprinkled with snow too, while the rich farmland between them was mostly snow (although not ice) free.


(click the pics to see the full size version on the Woolamaloo Flickr stream)

However, as I got further north, heading up past Perth, Pitlochry and further, the snow went from a light sprinkle to deeper, purer, whiter. As we got up into the Highlands proper and the Cairngorms national park it got colder and ever more spectacular. The view from the train window was quite simply spectacular: snowbound forests (fallen trees with their skinny, snow-covered branches looked like the skeletons of some long-spined creature), rivers swollen and fast-running with recent rain and snow runoff from the mountains, except where the water had frozen fast into ice.



Deer ran lightly through the snow; as the train past one field I saw a young buck, couldn't have been more than two years old, bouncing through the snow and off into the treeline. There were a number of football fans, all loaded up with beer, on the train (I think their match ended up cancelled because of the weather) but even they grew quiet, totally taken in with the astonishing beauty of the Scottish Highlands passing outside their window to the clickety-clack, clickety-clack beat of the train on its rails. You can feel the pressure on your ears as the train begins to climb steeply - it isn't as clear from the view but your body can feel it as the train pulls you ever higher into the land of mountains.



I haven't been up that far north in years, not since going on a few ski trips many moons ago and that was driving so you don't get to appreciate the view quite so much. Sitting on a train with a great big window you could just watch all of this slip past, one of most scenic parts of the whole of Europe just sliding past my window. God we're so lucky to live in this country - next time any of us moan about our weather we should think about these scenes then realise just how utterly beautiful our mountain kingdom is.

Accordion by the beach



Down on Portobello beach this afternoon (a dry day!!! a day with no howling gales!!! Quick everyone outside!!!), my mate's dog happily running around sniffing interesting smells (most animals walk about with their heads held up to see around them, except dogs, who trot around with their head pointing downwards so they can sniff everything) and as we walked along the beach we could hear music. Walking up onto the nearby esplanade we saw this chap playing the accordion, while nearby a wee boy was dancing happily to the music. It sounded like a little bit of France in the middle of Edinburgh's seaside and put us in happy mind of our trip to Paris coming up in a few weeks. I imagine in Paris accordion players busking must be a bit like bagpipers in Edinburgh.

Rhythm song

Checking YouTube for something completely unrelated I stumbled across this decent quality clip of one of my favourite musicians, the Scottish solo percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. I've loved Evelyn's work for years; being a solo percussionist was pretty remarkable in the classical world, being a woman who chose to forge a path as a solo percussionist even more so, but being a deaf woman who carves out an international career as a highly respected musician is just astonishing. I've been lucky enough to hear Evelyn perform live several times and she is a powerhouse on the stage, utterly immersed in her music; the notes she cannot hear she feels.

This clip is from the documentary Touch the Sound, which I saw at the Edinburgh International Film Festival a few years back and at which Evelyn surprised the audience by appearing during the director's Q&A and giving us an impromptu performance, just her alone with a snare drum, in the dark a single light shining up through the skin of the drum as she stood on the Filmhouse stage and utterly transported a rapt audience. I came out of the cinema into a bright summer day, a head full of music; that was one of those days where I floated home feeling the world was wonderful sometimes.

Surf's up!

Kite surfers taking advantage of the breeze at Longniddry Bents on the Forth for a bit of winter surfing across the waves and sometimes right into the air - so damned cool.





Take off time!

"Space, the final frontier... These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise; her five-year mission to seek out new life and new civilisations. To boldly go where no man has gone before..."

I've been cynical and wary about JJ Abrams' new Star Trek movie - if you haven't been following developments the Alias, MI-3 and Cloverfield creator is taking the series back to before the beginning, with the early days of the classic 60s Trek characters (Zachary Quinto - Sylar in the brilliant Heroes series - plays a young Spock). I have no problems with Abrams' storytelling abilities but I am wondering if I can possibly accept other actors in these roles, even essaying younger versions than we saw. After all I grew up on the original Trek - repeats of that and Pertwee then Baker era Doctor Who were my 1970s televisual SF fixes in those old, three-channel days - and I'm not sure I can take anyone else in those roles. Nonetheless this glimpse of the original, classic 60s style Enterprise under construction is pretty exciting to a geek like me; I especially like the way in the bigger version you can see inside the ship where the hull plates haven't been fixed yet; this looks like the original ship being 'born' and there's something romantic about the big ships, fictional or otherwise.



Trekmovie also had a link to this low quality YouTube someone uploaded of the teaser trailer being shown with the opening of Cloverfield in the US. Little to see except flares of light from welding torches as the camera pulls back to reveal the Starship Enterprise in drydock, being completed for her five year mission. The soundtrack is a mixture of speechs from the glory days of the Space Race, which again appeals strongly to my geek heart (I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up; I still do), from Kennedy's inspirational speech to Armstrong's "one small step", culminating in Leonard Nimoy (who returns to play the older Spock) uttering those immortal words, "space, the final frontier..." Despite my wariness the geek hairs on my neck stood up...

Quack quack

Walking along the Union Canal this weekend, ducks and other birds (sadly I do not know everything and bird types is one area I am weak in - anyone know what these black waterfowl with the white bills are?) swimming around. The ducks go past, the black birds swim past, their little red-orange webbed feet just visible through the greenish water, working away like the paddles on an old Mississippi steamboat. Then suddenly they start diving. Ploop! One minute they are there, next moment only concentric ripples spreading outwards on the surface of the water to show where they had been, then suddenly they pop up again elsewhere, like a WWII German U-Boat doing an emergency surface. I had a sudden urge to do my Jack Hawkins impression and call for the depth charges...

It was very hard to capture these sudden movements on the camera, so I switched to video mode instead. You can hear a voice at the start which is a tiny little girl with her dad shouting "quack quacks!" in delight. Nearby some narrowboats which are lived on the whole year long, the restored old Leamington Lift Bridge (I don't know why but it gives me such pleasure to see it raised and for holidaying folks to sail under it), the floating restaurant barge which cruises at the weekend, new waterfront cafes, offices and homes, the remains of the old Scottish and Newcastle brewery slowly being taken apart as the area is remade (Sean Connery lived just right round the corner from this spot as a boy and delivered milk in the area - now he comes back to the nearby cinema on a red carpet for the Film Festival every year). And this is all a short walk to my home in one direction and to Edinburgh Castle the other way. The little marvels we can see even in the middle of the city if we only stop and look for a moment and share that simple, childlike delight in these little surprises and presents the world offers us.



(apologies for the poor quality - my camera does very good video but that means big files so I need to reduce it so much to fit on YouTube it never looks right - oh well, it's free!)

Party on Princes Street

Dark and very wet in Edinburgh as they are doing the final preparations for tonight's Hogmanay bash - maybe not the best weather for standing outside for a huge open-air party. I'm giving it a miss - been there and done that many times (was there right at the very first one) and now at my age can't be bothered freezing outside for hours, queuing ages for the loo etc, better at my age to retire to the billiards room of my Gentlemen's Club with the port and (chocolate) cigars... The traffic was utterly fubared by the closure of Princes Street for the party, an endless line of cars and buses all the way back past Haymarket (I decided to walk, rain or not, it was quicker), which makes me worry how bad my daily trip to work will be when the stupid tram roadworks hit Princes St soon - wouldn't mind if it was useful, but the line won't go near 4/5 of homes so its bugger all use to most Edinburgh folks... Anyway, shot a quick panorama just after sunset; you can see a camera crew setting up on a platform to cover it, the lights of the fair in front of the illuminated Bank of Scotland Building over on the left, the stage almost ready in the Gardens and the Castle above it all.

Dusk at Fidra

Burned off a little of the constant over-feeding from the Festive period by going for a good two-hour walk on the beach with my mate Gordon when he took his dog for a decent run (Bruce does enjoy a good run on the beach although I think he enjoys all the other dogs he meets more, all those bums to sniff). On the way back the daylight was fading rapidly and the Forth was full of the noise of the many birds making last forays into the wet sand for food or flocking through the air while the lamp came on in the Fidra lighthouse.

Tyger

Another very imaginative animation found via YouTube (this one by Guilherme Marcondes), using a variety of media and inspired by one of my favourite poems by one of my all-time favourite poets (and artists), William Blake:

Oscar

A rather lovely Oscar Wilde animation, a mix of puppetry and stop-motion, I came across, by Lucy Knisley:

Waves

Down on the beach next to Yellowcraig by the Fidra Lighthouse, a couple of miles up the coast from North Berwick this afternoon. We lucked out in that the gray clouds parted to give us some sunshine, but the chill wind coming in right from the North Sea was bitterly cold and it drove the waves into the rocky shore so energetically we had to cut short our walk because sometimes the waves would literally come right up the entire beach to the dunes, so if you didn't want to do some November paddling (and this water is bloody cold in August!) then it was best to just head off elsewhere.




(seabirds skim the crashing waves at North Berwick)


(with the changing of the tides the seabirds were out in force but every time they landed to check the wet sand for tasty morsels the violent waves would come crashing in once more and into the air they'd leap)

The Bridge

A couple of weekends ago I took my parents on a belated anniversary gift of a trip on the Maid of the Forth, which sails out from South Queensferry opposite the Hawes Inn, where Davey Balfour is bundled aboard ship in Robert Louis Stevenson's superb adventure Kidnapped, then right under the mighty Forth Bridge.


(the Hawes Inn pub sign makes sport with its RLS connection)

I've seen this Victorian marvel of engineering a thousand times but this was the first time I had sailed under it; the real scale of the structure becomes staggeringly real when you are this close, right under the main cantilever sections, thousands of tons of steel hanging in the air above you, foundations driving right down into the river; it took the lives of over 50 men and boys to build it.


(going under the great Forth Bridge; check my Flickr stream for the full set of larger scale pictures)



From there the boat continues down the Forth, passing coastal towns old and new, country houses and modern oil and gas terminals, international ferries, Edinburgh in profile on one side, the Kingdom of Fife on the other and the Firth of Forth opening out towards the North Sea, islands - or 'inches' ranging from mere rocks to larger spots dotted throughout, many still showing marks of war, structures hurriedly added to protect the coast and nearby Rosyth naval dockyard during the two World Wars, now mostly they are full of colonies of seabirds (this whole part of the coast is a huge area for seabirds). History flows like the tidal waters here; Roman ships coming into nearby Cramond for the Antonine Wall forts, vikings, French men'o'war, English raiders, German aircraft - it's a working river still, tankers, international ferries, even aircraft carriers (HMS Ark Royal sailed down this route just a few months back, just barely fitting under even this high bridge).


(Inchcolm Abbey, my mum and dad in the foreground walking towards it, the Saltire fluttering in the breeze)

Eventually we come to Inchcolm island, home to a gorgeous 12th century abbey (although some maintain its religious life goes right back to Saint Columba himself, the man who brought Christianity to Scotland in the 500s AD). History and landscape and seascape and wildlife - birds, seals - of my beautiful homeland, a place so near to where I live but a place I had never been to before and I got to share it with my folks.


(sunset across the Forth from Inchcolm, the bridges in the distance; nearby some seals were popping their heads up to watch us, waiting on the visitors to leave for the day so they could come up and claim their beaches for the evening)

An hour and a half on Inchcolm wasn't nearly enough and we want go back again when the new season starts again next year. Afterwards we sailed back up the Forth as the sun set behind the Bridge, shafts of light breaking through the clouds at the end of the day as we sailed upriver, east to west. After docking, as dusk fell on a perfect day we wandered over to the Hawes Inn and settled ourselves down in the cosy wooden interior for drinks and dinner (lovely food, great, friendly service), a perfect end to a perfect day.

Popeye Vs Anime

Two separate cartoon cultures clash as Popeye comes face to face with Anime and has a similar reaction many folks not clued up in the genre have - what the heck is this? Warning, contains scenes of silliness, violence and spinach.

Blogland

I quite like these Blogland animations you can find on YouTube:

Painting on walls

I came across this very interesting animation via Meathaus - the medium of the animation is different from the great Prague alchemist of film Jan Svankmajer but the look and style of it reminds me very much of some of his early short works.

Out with a bang

And thus Edinburgh's Festival season, the world's biggest arts festival, comes to an end for another year with mighty explosions echoing across the city like the pounding of the Castle's cannons as the traditional classical music and fireworks concert took place. I was lucky enough to be invited to my friend's workplace which has a good view out towards the front of the Castle rather than standing with the 250, 000 others in the streets and hills of the city watching it all. It was a lovely late summer evening as we walked into the city centre, the last glow of the sun washing the stones of the Castle in a copper glow before finally fading into darkness, the stars beginning to appear in the sky above the floodlit fortress. An air of expectation from thousands of people waiting in the dark... The orchestra in the Gardens begins to play and suddenly the dark night explodes in light, colour and sound, incredibly ephemeral sculptures and flowers of light in the air, lasting only seconds.













I love fireworks - there are some things you never grow out of an a huge fireworks show is one of them. But fireworks launching into the sky from an ancient fortress atop a volcanic rock is something else again. I love living here. You can view the full set at larger sizes on my Flickr stream.

Nagymama

I love this very cool animation of a grandmother's tale:

Binari - Korean musicians at the Edinburgh Fringe

The Korean musicians I was talking about earlier, Binari, setting up for the Edinburgh Fringe as the Festival circus hits town. This is in Edinburgh University's historic Old College building quadrangle.

Edinburgh raft race

Some video footage from the recent raft race on the Union Canal near me - all the rafts were made from found material (yes, there was someone with a floating bath-tub too at one point!). It's so cool to see life back here now, it was run down for so long, now the canal is refurbished, back in use with holiday barges and some barges moored around the new quays which folk live on year round, restaurant barges go up and down the way, the old derelict areas and the the former brewery are all being redeveloped with new apartments, cafes and bars, while the towpath has been repaired from the old potholed, overgrown mudbath it used to be to a good path for walking and cycling now. And as you can see here as the competitors for one heat try to get to the start the old Leamington Lift Bridge has also been restored to working order. I knew it had been fixed up but for all the times I've passed this spot I'd never actually seen it working until now. I know I'm easily amused but it tickled me to see it working again after all this time.



It isn't a real raft race until someone ends up in the water.

Limo at the Castle

I decided on a rare dry evening after work to walk up to Edinburgh Castle and take some pics of it while the seating is up for the upcoming Edinburgh Military Tattoo (it also gets used for some concerts before and after the Tattoo - Blondie played there last weekend. Scarily Debbie Harry is only a few years younger then my mum!). As I was taking pics this Daimler Limousine arrived taking someone into the Castle. I have no idea if it was a member of the royal family, or an official or whoever it was as an ignorant tourist stepped right in front of my camera as the limo passed me so she could take a pic. I wonder who it was?

BBC on YouTube

The Beeb has been posting material to YouTube, higher quality than usual, although it isn't that great a mix so far to be honest - a lot of it is very short clips that were trailers for programmes shown on TV or the BBC websites before and I'm damned annoyed they blocked the embedding function which rather undermines the notion of YouTube and people sharing videos by embedding them on their sites and blogs. Still, they did have this clip from Mock The Week which is worth a look where the comedians compete to come up with unlikely lines for given situations.

New Jonas Moore mash-up

Upcoming multimedia webcomic The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore has had another musician take up the offer to remix material from the site - this time top producer Phil Nicholas, who has worked with Fat Boy Slim among others, has remixed Make It Through (sung by Steve Hart) to video and art material from the Jonas site. Very cool. I like the fact that Howard and his Jonas team are inviting people to remix material into new forms and the fact that quite a few musicians have taken up the offer so far means, hopefully, that it will mean the series will have appeal beyond the normal comics community too.

Jonas Moore mashups

There's an upcoming new multimedia webcomic coming up which I have been blogging about on the Forbidden Planet blog recently called the Many Worlds of Jonas Moore. Unlike most webcomics (some of which are very, very good) Jonas Moore is taking advantage of the fact it is online to used mixed media, so we we have comics panels, animation, video, music and even archive footage as we follow the actor Colin Salmon (from the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies and Resident Evil) as Jonas Moore, a character in an online game who has become sentient in a world where the British Empire never fell and the world population is kept quiet by being addicted to many online games, some of which seem very similar to our real history. Marked as defective and to be deleted JOnas goes on the run across the different games worlds. A bit Matrix, a bit Moorcock and a dash of Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright.



One of the things I really like about the concept isn't just the mixed-media format but the fact that Howard Webster is encouraging readers to take the material and remix it into their own mashups - so far some indy bands have remixed some of the viral videos they have created to go with their own music (such as the one above). With so many big studio comics-based movies using the bands on their soundtrack as a marketing gimmick to get folks to go I like the fact that Howard is doing this remake-your-own approach; they're also hoping if people remix material later on to create sidebar stories that the best may be incorporated into the ongoing story. Apparently this sort of approach is really pissing off the professional marketing folks and ad agencies, which, in my book, makes it even better. And doesn't Colin Salmon look bloody cool on that bike (Lili, stop drooling over him!)?

Crossing the Forth

Just a brief experiment with me sticking the camera out the window to capture crossing the Forth Road Bridge - even on a warm day my hands were chilled to the bone by the time we got across because of the wind and the slipstream, but it seems to have worked reasonably well so probably worth it. The much more impressive Forth Rail Bridge (often simply referred to as 'the Bridge' because it is so iconic) is off to the side, a fantastic piece of Victorian over-engineering.

Painted faces

How lovely is this brief trip through the history of Western portraiture: 500 years of female portraits, from Da Vinci to Pablo Picasso, morphing into one another, accompanied by a cello suit from Bach.

Flâneur animation

A very neat little Flâneur animation by Gould (amazing how inventive someone can be in a minute and a half) - Link via Boing Boing.

Dizzy fights the evil dandelion

Edinburgh from the air

At the weekend I did something I haven't done since I was a about seven years old - I climbed the 287 winding steps of the Scott Monument to the uppermost viewing gallery. Built to honour the memory of the famous Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott this great neo-Gothic rocket of Binny sandstone was completed in 1844; designed by George Meikle Kemp. Kemp was the son of a shepherd in the Pentland Hills, reputedly inspired from his rural existence as a boy by a visit to Roslyn Castle and Roslyn Chapel. He seemed to have a knack for the fine arts, but it was an an unknown he entered the public competition to design a memorial to Scott; in fact for the first round he used a pen name rather than his own humble name which at that time had no great reputation, so when his design was ultimately chosen he went from being a respected but not well-known draughtsman and designer to being responsible for one of the major iconic landmarks of the capital of Scotland, an area now designated as a UN World Heritage Site.

Sadly poor old George did not live to enjoy the fruits of his studies and labours; early in 1844, several months before the Monument was completed, he fell into the canal at Fountainbridge, not far from where I live, and was drowned. Citizens of the city lined the streets for his funeral procession as his casket was led to Saint Cuthbert's kirkyard, in the shadow of the Castle and in sight of his construction.

It was very odd to be back at a spot you hadn't been to in decades; last time I went up those stairs was with my mum and dad as a wee boy. One thing that was noticeably different was that the spiral stone staircase seemed a lot smaller and much, much narrower than it was a lad. One way up and one way down, so if you are going one way and other folks coming down the other it is a bit of a problem. The higher you go the more the spire narrows and so does the staircase. On the final segment from the mid gallery to the upper one the staircase becomes very, very narrow; the heavy stone walls are scraping my shoulders and I need to duck as the roof is lower. Hemmed in by dark stone blocks you could swear you are deep inside the lowest dungeon, which is a strange feeling when you know that you are almost 200 feet in the air.

The viewing platforms become smaller too as you ascend. The first one is relatively wide, with a tall, narrow room in the centre with beautiful stained glass windows and carved wood which includes the names of Watty's books carved into the decorations; many scores of feet beneath this is a similarly proportioned, but far plainer chamber, deep beneath the earth, between the massive stone pillars of the Monument which one guide claims go down almost 40 feet into the bedrock (our 19th century ancestors built to last). Up, up and up to the next level, wind blowing through the arrow slit windows of the stone stairwell (no escalator here, kids, you walk 200 feet into the air by foot) and a smaller gallery to look out from, all the time surrounded by dozens of sculptures, large and small, of characters from Scott's many books. That final, tight, narrow climb and out onto a tiny upper gallery barely wide enough for one person.

Wind streaking past you, carrying the sound of the bagpipe player at the gates to Princes Street Gardens up to you even 200 feet above him. I don't suffer from vertigo but leaning over the top still makes my stomach do a wee twirl; 200 feet may not sound much in our age of high-rise buildings but for the mid 19th century it must have seemed staggering. Since there is a limit on how tall a building can be in the centre of Edinburgh to preserve the brilliant skyline the Monument remains towering above most of its neighbours. Right across the road from it the Victorian splendour of Jenners Department Store, the original f