frightful

The first couple of times I walked to work from what was the new house just over a year ago I popped past London Road in order to establish whether or not it was worth avoiding like the plague on a bicycle, which I intended to start using again. After seeing at least four instances of idiotic driving by vans and buses in the space of about fifty metres I surmised that whilst London Road might have to be crossed at some point it would perhaps be to my advantage not to linger too long upon it, though experience has since shown that it's generally fine when there's little other traffic and as long as the usual guidelines about trusting no-one and assuming that everyone else can and will do something extremely stupid at some point are followed. I had wondered about using some of the Leith Links/Seafield/Restalrig/Lochend/Easter Road ex-train cycle-path (of which, at the time, only the Lochend-Easter Road section of which was properly-surfaced. I tend to use it a bit when walking but have only ever cycled down it in a commuting context on the way home, then only once or twice. It's not that the surface was impassibly terrible, just that because the track curves back north to meet Easter Road and Thorntreeside it doesn't really help me get any further south-west towards work, and only really helps me avoid Lochend Road, which is easily avoided by more direct means.

Some of the remaining path was resurfaced during March, as threatened/promised last September, though only between Lochend and the southerly bit of the former junction at Seafield beside the former Eastern General. Light-posts have also been installed, though without any lights on them, though they'll presumably be emplaced before they become useful in the autumn. One reason why lights would be particularly useful is not to make the path safer to use at night in a not-getting-mugged-or-murdered sense but to enable the user to be able to more easily identify and avoid any one of the several thousand dogshites which grace the path at any one time. The uniform surface of the resurfaced section should make turds easier to spot, which it why it's all the more unfortunate that one of the bits left out from the resurfacing was the access ramp up to Restalrig Road. The access ramp up to Findlay Gardens was tarmacamed, albeit quite badly at the bottom but the slope up to Restalrig Road, as well as being the most useful ramp (as far as I'm concerned) is also the worst place for dogshites to hide amidst the grass and mud. Because it's seen as a handy bit of grass-and-mud just off a main road it's incredibly popular with lazy shit-for-brains dog-owning scumbags who think that stepping two feet away from the pavement absolves them of any responsibility to encourage their animals to shit responsibly. Hopefully the permapuddle at the bottom of the slope will no longer appear after heavy rain, as it was that which once forced me to have to cut onto the slope through the grass whereupon the pram's wheel and my trainer picked up a little contamination, so far the only incidence thereof but only due to generally deliberately avoiding that access slope, often at a cost of ten minutes to a journey.