The hardest part being the head and not the heart –

I wait on the shore, feeling as people often do by the shore, thought-stripped but full of feelings as fine as sand, raw as salt spray.

 

This is another way of saying, I’ve no news. There is never such a thing as a static position – I can see the waves churning, or gently drawing in and out like breathing, like the unseen moon making the sea loch above breathe. But I would wish for clearer weather-in two ways. Here it has been dreich, miserable, cold and wind and rainspattered, almost every day this week, more. Not amenable to jaunts at all, no gathering of sights nor finding greenspace and colour and light to enliven and make the waiting easier.

 

Tomorrow, though, tomorrow. For the simpler problem. D and I have found a good prospect for a flat – in Colony housing.  The name sounds strange, as if they were little villages off on their own, with societies that functioned under the rule of an oppressor. But the colonies of Edinburgh are all lovely two-floor flats with each flat having a garden leading up to a well-painted front door. They were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s as part of a philanthropic/co-operative movement to provide housing for skilled workers and artisans who would otherwise have to live in slums. My hope is that on our visit to the Abbeyhill colony, I’ll manage to get some shots of this fine part of town.

 

Already I am intrigued, because the street we are going to does not, on the face of things, appear to exist. Type it into Google maps, and the arrow shows where it should be, but the street name is wrong. We tried Yahoo and some independent sites. In each, the marker appears for the address we want, and the street name is different. Our street does not exist. But there is a photo of the flat we will visit, and Streetview reveals that it is there, on that wrong street (which is, simultaneously, the right place, according to all the information we could find). What does it mean? I like to think it’s something like platform 9 3/4, that we will have to run at the wall to make our way there. It might make receiving post a little tricky.

 

But a little magic, right now, would be just the thing.