simultaneously familiar and foreign

After a reasonably successful day featuring more ability to concentrate than I've had for a while it looks like I might be able to be off from the end of tomorrow for eight working days and not have to pop in on Wednesday for a bit. I should get to go back to normal office tomorrow afternoon, though (despite the unfriendliness to cyclists once they reach the car park despite the greater convenience of the site to cycle to) I've grown reasonably used to being back in this office for a bit. When I was last permanently based here I generally had my lunch at my desk in order to be able to escape more quickly in the evening and didn't do that much wandering around the pleasant nearbyness, though a few of us would sometimes pop out for a run along the river and around Inverleith Park in the evening so I had at least discovered the Water of Leith walkway by 2004. When taking the wingpiglet for a sleep-inducing jiggle along the old railway walkway at Seafield this evening I started remembering the day I first discovered the north Edinburgh cycle paths, the first time I found the Balerno end of the Water of Leith walkway and started trying to work out when I first realised that there was a nice long tunnel and cycle path beside the hill. If I ever work it out with any sort of accuracy I'll have to make a note and take an appropriately relevant picture on the day I remember as there won't be anything from the appropriate time of the appropriate thing. Although my original copy was thieved by a temporary Australian flat-guest in 1996 I think there should still be a mid-1990s Bartholemew Strreetfinder map somewhere in my possession, as purchased prior to moving up here and studied so that I would vaguely know my incipient neighbourhood. I'd be interested to see how clearly the river walkway and cycle paths are marked so that I can wonder at a world in which I didn't know of their existence, and wonder if the map indicated their presence and why, if it did, I didn't find them until much later. Apart from there being little reason why I'd have needed to be at anything at either end of them or anywhere in between.

One advantage of being back in the normal office tomorrow afternoon is that I can relatively quickly pop to Maplin before going home to get a wee hard drive dock to interrogate and/or rescue bits from Nicky's laptop's hard drive's first partition before reformatting and reinstalling everything. On the way there I can wonder at how, from 1999 to early 2001, I would occasionally cycle along Dalry and Gorgie roads to work, passing within metres of the Roseburn end of the cycle network but in complete ignorance of its existence for some of that time.