the slightest provocation

In the past I reached Portobello prom almost exclusively by bicycle from the east on my normal route, first going along the Innocent path then Milton Road East. If I remembered that it was likely to be extremely busy along the seafront I'd go along the high street, forgetting that it would be just as busy and full of cars. The rest of the time I'd dismount and trot along the pedestrian no-bicycling bit and remount when permitted. Once or twice I reversed the route and went through the Meadows first, then the various bits of the north Edinburgh cycle path network starting at Roseburn at exiting onto the main road at Hawthornvale but the anticlockwise version always felt much more natural. Once I arrived by bus, a few times ended up there after a particularly prolonged post-work detour-wander and more recently have been running along it at night but have rarely walked along it slowly enough to notice the various things I noticed today, such as the presence of a friendly-looking and coffee-capable café conveniently close to where Nicky decided we would stop for a while before reversing and returning home. Whilst the entire promenade system is now much closer than it used to be the several-hundred-metre section of main road between us and it is something we'll have to find a way round if we're to go there with any sort of frequency. It never takes very long to pass that section by bicycle and I tend to run along it at night when most of the cars are away to their beds but in the middle of the afternoon on a sunny day it's not the best place to walk pushing a pair of young and fresh lungs in a buggy, though the old railway sticks a few layers of leaves between foot-based people and the road (albeit at the expense of having to be slightly more vigilant for dogshit underfoot) and I was slightly amazed that two different actual motor-cars (one of them an actual beemer, normally driven only by utterly selfish cyclist-and-pedestrian-hating bastards) actually slowed down and flashed for us to proceed when we were gingerly crossing the main road, something I have almost never seen happen except from behind the wheel. I'm wanting to get the wingpiglet comfortable with our various inherited sling apparata but will test them around the house first to get him comfortable before testing them outside, especially when there's the added complication of shielding him from the sun to be considered so went for the buggy today not knowing about its potential traffic-calming abilities.

Approaching the main pedestrian (though try telling that to everyone who cycled past) section from the west at least gave us a heads-up that it would be unpleasantly busy even though it probably wasn't that warm for people sitting still on the sand though those drinking straight from a bottle of apparently vodka probably didn't notice. One somewhat idiotic gentleman had taken precautions in case he became cold wandering around in just a T-shirt and pair of Speedoes by taking his car onto the beach so that he could get to it quickly. The police were just making their way over to him as we arrived but they didn't seem to immediately arrest and remove him as they really should have, especially as an amusing accidental consequence of the driver's detention would have been the partial immersion of the abandoned car when the tide returned. Considering that a lot of the reason for living this far north is the relative lack of occasions when it becomes inconveniently necessary to shield the skin from the sun's harmfully directly-overhead-and-relatively-un-atmospherically-attenuated beams it's weird that so many people rush to expose themselves and burn themselves to buggery the moment they perceive it to be bright enough. The other day there was someone doing it in the park who was lying flat on his back in exactly the same position when I passed him on my way back from the shop as he had been fifty minutes earlier on my way there who, had he been me, would have had to have skin grafts. The woman above remained completely motionless for the forty minutes we were sitting opposite, though on reflection she might have been dead rather than sunbathing as surely no-one would choose to sunbathe with their face twenty inches from a bin into which increasing amount of soft drinks cans, beer cans, beer bottles, vodka bottles, cigarette butts, sweet wrappers, crisp wrappers and ice-cream wrappers were being placed which would probably have eventually resulted in unpleasant amounts of pigeons, seagulls and conceivably even wasps, though it is similarly conceivable that this would significantly increase the seasideyness of the experience for her.