Breaking news

You may have heard of clootie trees.

City of Edinburgh Council's 'Modernising Waste Team' seek your opinions on how to handle rubbish collection and recycling in the city.

Inevitably, at the heart of the survey are questions concerning wheelie-bins and their alternatives in the World Heritage Site.

Sanguinary New Year disorder occurred on the night of 31 December 1811 and the early morning of 1 January 1812.

The Daily Mail may view recent student disorder as a first sign of civilisation's imminent collapse south of the border, but the Spurtle is more sanguine north.

Riotous assembly here in Edinburgh has a long history, so long indeed that in some ways it seems more the norm than the exception.

Perhaps City of Edinburgh Council should now acknowledge occasional mob rule as a charming folk tradition, take steps to promote it, and commence an aggressive PR campaign marketing unruliness as an international year-round tourist attraction.

LCCC meets tonight at 7:30pm in McDonald Rd Library. Subjects for discussion will include the Pilmeny Youth Group, Leith Decides, and election results for the Association of Scottish Community Councils.

For an agenda and minutes of November's meeting, see Extras 13.12.10.

When Councillor Charles Dundas forwarded us a list of grit-bin locations in the City Centre ward on 6 December (Breaking news 6.12.10), we assumed that similar lists would soon be forthcoming from City of Edinburgh Council for other wards partially covered by the Spurtle: Leith Walk, Leith and Inverleith.

We had underestimated the capacity of a bureaucracy to make something seemingly straightforward mind-bendingly difficult.

Edinburgh City Council has published an update on refuse collection during the wintry weather on its website:

The Union Gallery's new exhibition – 'The Animals are Coming' – is an ecclectic assembly of works, unified chiefly by quality and the taste of gallery owners Bob Dawkins and Alison Auldjo. There are indeed animals in many of the offerings, but animals treated or alluded to in so many different ways that they do not coalesce around any particular theme.

Since October last year, Drummond Community High School has been running a Cultural Peer Project which both participants and independent observers are rating very highly.

Spurtle contacted Birgit Harris –  adult eduction programme organiser at Drummond – for the low-down, since the Peer Project emerged from an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) conversation class which she has been teaching there since 2007.

City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) undertake to clear main routes of snow and ice, whilst – not unreasonably – expecting citizens themselves to make more effort to clear minor routes and pavements.

Back in January, they actively encouraged members of the public to use kerbside grit bins for this purpose.

On 30 November, Spurtle contacted the Council and asked for a map showing all grit bin locations in the Broughton area. A little later the reply came that no such map existed.