(For those blessed with one of the higher resolutions, there's a bigger version of this pic in my files).

This is the view from my window. The front room in my flat should really be the living room, but I'm occupying it with an ancient noisy computer and about 1000 books.

The photo was taken at about 17h00, so the soundtrack is traffic noise and Radio 4. Looking at it again the photo reminds me of one of my earliest experiences of Edinburgh. I was walking through the open space next to the Royal Academy on the Mound, just off Princes Street. The sky was deep blue and clear. Suddenly I heard a roaring voice behind me, "Ye sinners of Edinburgh! You are lucky for the Lord has chosen to smile on you today!" I can't remember the rest of what he said but it made me laugh.

The shop on the far left is a printer's. I haven't been there in ages, I used to go there to get charity society stuff done when I was a student. The two guys who run it are really nice, though I haven't seen one of them around in a long time so maybe he left the business.

They used to have a big ginger labrador-ish dog (not exactly thoroughbred) and a sign in the window saying, 'If you want to take a friendly dog for a walk, enquire within'. Once when I was in there she attacked my bag in a playful kind of way. I was a bit surprised as I didn't have any meat in there, turned out it was the carrots she wanted. Maybe she wasn't born ginger, but got that way eating too many carrots.

Anyway there's a sign in the door in memory of the dog, I suppose a lot people round here will miss her as she used to sit out the front of the shop when the weather was tolerable.

The yellow-looking shop in the middle is a Kurdish restaurant. I've been there a couple of times. Kurdish food all seems to involve tomatoes. It's quite nice though. I'm surprised how much is familiar — nan bread, felafel, baclawa and so on. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised, a friend of mine from the Middle East tells me that there are some things you can always find anywhere, all the way from Turkey to Saudi Arabia.

I was in there last week, ordered a supposedly vegetarian thing and got two whacking great chunks of lamb on it. I suppose I'm not that vegetarian, I ate it anyway. They obviously haven't got used to what the British will put up with yet, the food was all fresh, no reheated rice or stale bread.

At the end is Tollcross junction, one of the busiest junctions in central Edinburgh. It has an old clock and a strange traffic layout, five roads meet there. Anyway, I should save that for a future episode.

On the right is an Episcopal Church. Apparently it's the most Catholic Episcopal Church in Scotland (Catholic as in Roman). I didn't realise there were degrees of these things, I thought all the Episcopals were Anglicans. They held one of their services outside over Easter, there was an awful lot of incense around.

That's it for now. I think I'll go along to the next photo in the order of how much time I spend in different places, so it'll either be the Meadows or the pub.