Very cool, if true

Friday evening was an awesome party at tisme's place. Which is neatly hidden away by Arthur's Seat, overlooking the crags. You can literally walk out of her front door, and less than 30 metres away you're standing on a bank in Holyrood Park with a fantastic view. This came in very useful on Saturday evening when we set off a few leftover fireworks.

Anyway, the party was a P-Arty, where everyone came as something art-inspired. This meant no less than four people came as Magritte's Son Of Man, there were multiple Frida Kahlos and Van Goghs there (one with a head bandage, one with a hanging ear, and one with green skin which did a remarkable job of looking like one of his self-portraits.

Julie and I also went with a Van Gogh theme. Can you guess what it is?




(cheers to Brian for the second picture)

Saturday was fantastically luxurious. We slept in until midday, pottered around the flat, played a heap of Borderlands, and then walked around Arthur's Seat to watch the fireworks going off around the city. The road around the back of it gives you a great view over 2/3 of Edinburgh, and there were constant bursts of light from different directions as people set them off in their back gardens, and we walked down through the end of Salisbury Crags, where people were setting them off from the cliff face and the grass banks - it's right next to one of the halls of residence so the students were out in force.

We then dropped in on tisme again, who was having a bonfire, had a more relaxed chat for an hour or so*, set off some fireworks, barely managed not to set fire to ourselves**, and Julie took my favourite recent photo of me:


And then we got a bus home, getting off to discover that someone had set fire to the side of Arthur's Seat nearest our flat:

the structure on the right hand side is St Anthony's Chapel, where lizzie_and_ari got married, if that helps locals to place it. You'll have to excuse the shakiness, the best view was from the middle of the street, and my hands were almost numb from cold, so I wasn't as steady as I could be for a three-second exposure.

* I enjoy parties, but I vastly prefer the conversations you get when there are less than 10 people.
** it turns out that "retreat 25 metres" is not just a vague guideline and more of a "if you don't want to have smoking holes in your clothing" warning.