Autumn Walk
Inversion
I was really happy to get out for a decent walk today, despite the dodgy weather at the start of it. My phone tells me it was 12,000 steps or so, which is somewhere between 9 and 12 kilometres depending on how long you think my stride is. It will be meaningless to those of you who don’t know Edinburgh, but essentially I walked from our house to Slateford, then joined the Union Canal Walkway at the aqueduct and walked west to Wester Hailes.
The walk had three objects: the first was to have a longer walk than my regular route; the second was to walk over the aqueduct and explore part of the canal I hadn’t visited before; the second was to scout out a couple of locations for the work in progress. All three goals were achieved. I’d love to illustrate this with photos I took, but the light was all a bit too flat and the pics really only have value for me as writing prompts. The two photos in this post were both taken earlier, from our front bedroom window (Fuji X-Pro1 and XF 18-135mm lens, if you’re interested).
The canal footpath was relatively narrow for a lot of its length, and was in good use by walkers, many with dogs, joggers and cyclists. I developed an unhealthy dislike for cyclists as the walk went on.
Distant Rain
Happily, although the route was obviously tended, it was unobtrusively managed. I can’t say the same for the early part of the route on the route of the old railway from Corstorphine to Balgreen, a walk I did a lot in the early part of lockdown. There, all the shrubs and bushes on either side of the path have been hacked back. I understand the need for management, and I understand that now is the time to do it as the plants enter into a dormant phase, but there’s no obvious aesthetic consideration given to the hacking, just a desire to cut it all away. Of course, that path is much more accessible than the canal towpath, which probably protects the towpath.
There has been a lot of talk in Edinburgh of late about the many otters that are coming back into the city, and the canal is one of the main routes they’ve taken. Unfortunately none were to be seen today. Nor, for that matter, was there much else going on. Mallards and Moorhen on the canal, wagtails and gulls everywhere else. A lot of magpies, too.
Towards the end of the walk, at Murrayburn, an old bloke was priming the many birdfeeders he (presumably) had fixed between the canal and the flats. I found that remarkably life-affirming, as were the multiple dog paw prints in the cement under a bridge. When I came up from the canal side to the main road at Wester Hailes, I noticed that a trick of the contours and slopes made it look as though the canal was flowing uphill towards the east, like the Electric Brae.
The walk ended in the best way possible: when I got home I had a mug of tea and a biscuit, then promptly went for a nap.
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I like the Fuji X-Pro1 I used for the photos, but have been toying with upgrading it. The difficulty is that it would be a more expensive course of action than a pension allows. I do, though, have a lot of film cameras and lenses bought from eBay when they were going cheap, most have which have also had maintenance work done on them.
I had a batch of films processed a couple of months back and was disappointed with the results. If they had been from one camera I’d seriously have wondered if there was an issue with it, but the films were exposed in several cameras so either there was a consistent problem with me or a consistent problem with the lab I used. In this case I don’t think the problem was me. Although I like film photography a lot, unless you process your own film it is getting to be erratic and expensive.
I’ve been toying for a while with selling most of the film cameras and using the proceeds towards the upgrade to the Fuji. The problem is that once I take the film cameras out I find a reason to hold onto them all. Some of the old lenses, though, match really well on the Fuji with an adaptor. Thought is needed.
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Music: some of my earliest memories of television are of Watch With Mother. My favourite of them was Tales of the Riverbank, brought to mind by today’s canal-side walk. This was the theme tune, otherwise known as Andante in C by Mauro Giuliani ( 1781-1829).
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