EDINBURGH TOWN COUNCIL.

The usual meeting of the Town Council was held to-day—Lord Provost Sir James Steel presiding.

THE HOUSING QUESTION IN GREEENSIDE.

A letter was read from the chairman of a public meeting held in Greenside, transmitting a copy of resolutions passed at the meeting on the subject of the housing question in Greenside. The letter contained the resolutions which were passed at that meeting.

7pm, TUESDAY 20 APRIL

Spurtle is holding a hustings for the Edinburgh Northern & Leith constituency in the Scottish Parliament elections.

The event will take place online from 7pm on Tuesday 20 April. We expect it to last about an hour.

You can sign up to attend (for free) here.

The earliest known figurative representation of the human form depicts an exaggeratedly proportioned pregnant woman carved from mammoth tusk.

That Hohle Fels Venus, discovered in 2008 in southern Germany, is at least 35,000 years old. According to its finder, Nicholas Conard, it ‘radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Palaeolithic art’.

POLICE SEEK WITNESSES

Spurtle received a press release yesterday from Police Scotland. We reproduce it in full below.

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Officers in Edinburgh are appealing for the help of the public to establish the movements of a man whose body was found in the Water of Leith.

EDINBURGH TAILORS’ STRIKE

Beyond the fact that numbers of men are leaving the town for other work, nothing fresh transpires this morning in connection with this dispute from the men's point of view. The communication which came from Graham Hunter from the masters’ point of view has been referred to the Executive in Glasgow, and therefore, if the dispute is advanced a stage will come from that quarter. The strike roll now stands at about 550.

This interesting graffiti at the Broughton Street end of Albany Street Lane makes use of a pre-existing incision in a random flagstone.

At first glance it reads like a half-remembered song lyric, but in fact it loosely paraphrases part of Mao Zedong’s concluding speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Party on 6 November 1938.

We thought it might be interesting today to quote from Zedong’s paradoxical Problems of War and Strategy at greater length.

Following our article about a (more interesting than expected) access cover on George Street, reader Sam Murray got in touch about another.

This one is situated on Clarendon Crescent, and includes the intriguing detail ‘BOYCE & JOHNSTON, BEAVER BANK FOUNDRY’. Murray and Spurtle investigated further.