You can travel the world on a Hebridean beach.
Each outgoing tide leaves behind stories: flotsam, jetsam, bookshelves and messages in bottles.
Or you can stay at home and wander the lampposts of Edinburgh.
Some poles include only the tight-packed prose of traffic regulation orders. Others are adhesive palimpsests, competing tales like barnacles encrusting rocks.
Berlin ‘s illicit drug scene features often, as do fascist football casuals from across the Continent.
An eye-catching, thought-provoking, and well-executed piece of street-art has appeared at the Tesco end of the Rodney Street tunnel. For the full effect, see the foot of this page.
The work, by Mark Tremaine Agbi ‘Okata’, was commissioned by Sustrans UK to mark Black History Month. It is one of eight pieces across the country’s National Cycle Network, created to highlight Scotland’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It’s an admirable initiative, which we applaud.
On Monday, Spurtle reported the surprising things to be found behind bushes in King George V Park.
The wall paintings there featuring fabulous creatures were new to us, and we asked readers if anyone knew who was the artist responsible.
Within hours, reader Laura Vivanco got in touch to tell us her father, Miguel (still resident in the neighbourhood), began work on the mural in 1976.
The northern boundary of King George V Park comprises the rear wall of a long shed opening onto the former Royal Bank of Scotland carpark.
It’s hidden behind a screen of trees and shrubbery, but a foray into the interior reveals a remarkably ambitious and peculiar mural.
Reading from left to right, it begins with mostly aquatic creatures, including a frilled-neck lizard, a huge frog, octopus, sea snake, turtle, seal (possibly) and hippopotamus (maybe).
Councillors on the Culture & Communities Cmte last month approved a Report on Edinburgh Council’s Graffiti Strategy.
The Report comes at a time when anecdotal evidence suggests graffiti – or at least the repetitive territorial marks known as ‘tags’ as opposed to ‘street-art’ – have become more prevalent across the city.
This intriguing enigma appeared in Bellevue recently.
The point seems to be that either a food product is so unhealthy that to consume it displays a lack of common sense. Or that a lack of common sense explains people’s failure to consume this healthy food product.
There’s a self-contradictory balance at play here, although other explanations are likely available.
Gentle breeze
The lack of ‘natural surveillance’ on our streets during Lockdown was probably the biggest contributor to an outpouring of graffiti and tagging across Broughton over recent months.
Not sure there’s much more to be said …
Ever since Drum Property closed down the majority of shops and local businesses on Stead’s Place, the mute shutters have served as a sounding board for every kind of local opinion, outpouring, oath, and obscenity it’s possible to imagine.
What looked at first like a kind of silencing has had just the opposite effect.
Thanks go to observant Spurtle contributor D.M., who captured the following images over recent days.
We really enjoy these suggestive vignettes, and present them without further comment.
NO SHORTAGE OF OPINIONS ACROSS SPURTLESHIRE
We’re an opinionated and contradictory bunch in these parts.
Everyone brimming with views, but not always keen to give vent to them in public and in person.
Perhaps this explains the recent rash of pronouncements around the barony, signs offering advice on everything from self-help to the creative big picture.
AND THIS ISN’T IT