Room with a view

Family birthdays today - up to Dundee for lunch with my parents to mark my father's 73rd birthday earlier in the week, and then back through Fife for tea and cake for L's nephew K's 24th. This is the view from the room that was my bedroom, growing up as a teenager. The Tay estuary is still visible, even if one or two new and extended buildings have blocked a little more of the view. Across the river you can see Tayport in Fife, and the white painted lighthouse on the way to the road bridge that is just out of shot. Closer by is the facade of the old Regal Cinema. It was adapted to be used as a cinema in 1936, although the building dates back to 1870. With local cinemas in decline in the 1970s, bingo was introduced in 1978, at first part-time with film screenings and later full-time but the building still closed in 1991. Parts of the cinema, like the foyer on the main road, were demolished then as it was converted into a car showroom, but the main building remains. A little up the street from the Regal is the wall of the school playground - the old building of Grove Academy, my secondary school - great for getting up as late as possible in the morning when school was just across the road. At the moment, with the new Grove built across the street, it is now used to house Eastern Primary which has moved from its old building a short distance away.

Realised that this is my 'real' BlipDay - 365 pictures without a gap, going back to the end of October last year when I decided I'd try to do Blip 'properly'. It does work better if you do it every day - the pressure to get something forces me to be creative in the least promising of situations, and it's good to have pictures of ordinary things on ordinary days. After we got back from Fife yesterday went to another St Brides ceilidh in the evening. A few people who might have been going cried off for one reason or another, so I thought it would be another evening dancing with strangers. Not that that's a problem at a ceilidh as it always seems easy to find dance partners. There was a big group of North Americans in last night (mostly Canadians but a few from the USA) who seemed keen to try the dances at their first proper ceilidh so plenty of different partners. And then my Swedish friend P arrived with her daughter and a German friend and her daughter and so I got to do some of the dances with P and her friend, while the two girls danced mostly with each other. Danced through the whole evening too, without missing a dance, which always feels good!