Should auld acquaintance be forgot ...

Auld Reekie lit up at The Bells

You may be able to take the boy out of Scotland but it is not possible to take Scotland out of the boy.  It's odd - or maybe not so hard to make sense of when you think about it - but somehow it just never feels that my New Year celebrations are complete until I know the fireworks have lit up the sky above Edinburgh Castle.  

The good side of this ex-patriot romanticism is that you get to enjoy 'the Bells' twice.  Not that one could see it through the night to witness the Scottish New Year as it arrived.  No.  When the clocks of Princes Street struck Midnight and the skies over Auld Reekie exploded with sparkling light we were fast asleep.  Some time later we woke pleasantly and slowly to a warm summer morning (just) and a lazy day ahead kicked off with a delicious breakfast.  Spike asked me if mangoes and melon would suffice?  Well ... as we say in the old country ... is the Pope a Roman Catholic and do bears shit in the wood?  As it turned out we enjoyed mango, melon, strawberry and blackberry fruit salad then creamy scrambled eggs on toast.  Not quite your typical Ne'erday breakfast in Scotland where there would be less mango, melon, strawberry and blackberry and more bacon, square sausage, black pudding and tattie scones to accompany the eggs - scrambled or fried or both.  The Scottish breakfast has no less magic in the right circumstances; just different... in a heart-attack way.

I found the photograph in a story about the success of Edinburgh's Hogmanay elebrations on The Scotsman web site.  One sentence in particular caught my fancy.  It reads, "Vast crowds had descended on the Royal Mile and Princes Street by early afternoon, lapping up the unusually mild weather, with temperatures soaring as high as 10 degrees."  As I sheltered in a cool part of the house, as far away from Canberra's 33 degree start to the year as I could reach, I thought, 10 degrees man?  No half bad for New Year's Eve.