You may be experiencing a chronological meltdown.

Your dreary minutes may seem to last for hours. Dull hours for days. Each week may be indistinguishable from any other, each in its own repeat eternity.

How shall we navigate such fog? No normal chronometer will serve, not one designed to measure intervals between events. We need something new, an anti-clock, something particularly fit for nothingness and accurate to within a fraction of an absence.

Cometh the hour, cometh the shop.

TO-DAY’S POLICE NEWS.

EDINBURGH CITY—Before BAILIE GIBSON.

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS’ CRIME.

There were 74 new prisoners brought to the bar. The charges were: Disorderly, 30; incapable, 22; assault, 7; nuisance, 5; theft, 3; begging and housebreaking, 2 each; and drunk in charge of a child, drunk in charge of a horse, and cruelty to children, 1 each.

FRIENDS FALL OUT.

A Compendium

of

New Town

Noir.

*****

Viz.

North Edinburgh’s

Back-Streets & Dark Corners

as Reported in

Scottish Broadsheets

during His Late Majesty’s Reign

from 20 January 1901 to 6 May 1910.

*****

Compiled from Original Sources

& Most Attentively Annotated

for the Convenience, Elucidation & Entertainment

of Generous Subscribers

by

A. J.

W A V E R L E Y   M A R K E T,

PRINCES STREET, EDINBURGH.

_____

H. E. MOSS

Has much pleasure submitting the following List of

SPECIALITIES AND NOVELTIES

for his

TWENTY-SECOND CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR

C A R N I V A L,

COMMENCING ON

Following 5 previous consultation rounds, and before submitting a full planning application for the Powderhall Bowling Greens site later this month, those behind the proposals this morning presented final plans to the public and answered questions.

Representatives of Collective Architecture, City of Edinburgh Council, and Urban Pioneers (landscape architects) discussed proposals on Zoom with around 16 interested parties, most of whom live or work locally.

No great surprises

ROUND 1

1.   Antigua

2.   Uncle Albert

3.   Broughton

4    St Mark's Square

5.   Airlie

ROUND 2

6.   St Vincent

7.   Eildon Hill(s)

8.   Stanley Baxter

9.   Prue Leith

10. Chris Bonnington

ROUND 3

Professor Cliff Hague, Chairman of the Cockburn Association, delivered the heritage watchdog’s annual lecture last night on Zoom.

His theme was the Frankenstein’s monster that is festivalisation – in particular, Edinburgh’s monstrous creation that has grown too big for the laboratory and now threatens to ruin the very apparatus that gave it birth.

Well, that was this viewer’s expectation. Instead, what emerged was a calm, forensic account of how the Festivals and Fringe emerged in the city and grew to their current proportions.

The article below, apparently written on Christmas Day 1790, appeared in the Caledonian Mercury on 1 January 1791.

It is possible that the subject matter appealed to some Presbyterian editor sucking in his cheeks at the celebration of a Rome-ish mass south of the Border. But it is more probable that the Editor enjoyed the deadpan humour of a supposed 'member of the Church of England' urging abstemiousness in terms that would have struck many disapproving or hypocritical Scots as excessive.

As you read this, advanced copies of the December/January Spurtle are already appearing across the barony like Lockdown-busting shoppers from Newcastle trying to keep a low profile in parties of 30.

Page 1 steps gingerly into the traffic, looking both ways before tumbling headlong into a rain-filled pothole. It carries news of stable development, local views (and their possible absence), and the great smell of coffee not everybody likes.