THE THEATRE IN MY BACK GARDEN

As I looked out of our sitting-room window while sipping my coffee and nibbling at my Sainsbury's Sultana Scone, this was the scene I encountered: cat eyeing squirrel either hungrily or with territorial complaint, squirrel weighing the possibility of sheltering in the hole in the wall opened to allow the drainpipe through against the prospect of sharing the province with the cat below, all of this being played out around the doorway of my new neighbor at number 12.

[The squirrel is on the drainpipe. If you can't see him click on the image to enlarge it.]

This, I remind myself, is the experience of the tightly packed old city -- even in New Town. I have grown unaccustomed to such scenes through the relative seclusion of my own back yard with its fenced in pretense of privacy, and further back through the general expanse of the comparatively recent sprawl of cities like Des Moines where things tend to sit comfortably side-by-side rather than in the complex overlays of centuries and species that I found this morning.

Oh, perhaps you are still unaware that the wife and I have moved -- at least temporarily. Worry not, though, we have not left the ancestral manse for good, that hard-won home in upstate New York. For the time being, though, I reside in Edinburgh, right here in fact. [Just click the image below to zoom in.] It is in this location, these thousand or so square feet in the midst of Edinburgh, that I shall spend the next four months writing, reading, and renewing my studio life, surrounded by the oddly organic intertwining of slate roofs, squirrels, and security systems.



And with that, dear reader, I will depart -- the coffee completed and the last scone-crumb consumed -- to explore further my new neighborhood, and perhaps today a bit further afield.