It was a great week in Paris, but now I'm back in Edinburgh and back at work. While I was away the final bits of organisation and monetary matters were concluded, and a couple of days after I got back I moved into a new flat. It's a really good feeling to get a place after so much time spent looking, and I moved in over the weekend. The first few days in a new flat are always slightly strange - the oddness of waking up and not realising where you are, having to work out a new storage system for your pants, etc. The novelty hasn't worn off yet.
It's a traditional Edinburgh tenament building, all high ceilings and cornices. The ceiling of the living room is a stunning dark purple, and the newly-laid click-together wooden floor is still slippy if you walk about in socks (as I found out the other day). The lounge has an 'Edinburgh Press' - a door with shelves behind it. By some unfortunate irony the stairwell light shines through the window over our front door, then through a window above my bed into my room. It had developed a maddening on-off-on-off blinking, so as I was lying there the first night I felt like an enemy combatant being prepped for interrogation. The next day a few bits of cardboard taped to the window, and it was all the better.
We celebrated the new flat in traditional last-Tuesday-in-February fashion, by having pancakes. There can be few foods that have a better easiness of preparation:great taste ratio (apart from handing a fiver to a chipshop proprieter). Blobbing the batter into a sizzling pan and quickly swirling it around becomes automatic after a while, and the pile of freshly-made pancakes soon builds up - only to reduce again almost as quickly. There was a certain irony as we watched 'You are what you eat' whilst stuffing our faces with pancakes. But our new IKEA coffee table looked great with all the fillings on it - honey, sugar, lemon juice, maple syrup, chocolate sauce, strawberry syrup, bananas, apples in caramel sauce, and two types of ice cream. You are what you eat indeed...
The lounge, with 'Press'
