A Summer's Day

Today is one of those warm sunny days that feels like summer, which we've nad very few of this year here in Edinburgh.

Here are the bright flowers at Harrison Park

They're full of solitary bees and hoverflies with only a few bumble bees.

This hoverfly is a syrphus ribesii

Along the canal, the thistle down is out

and the verges are bright with flowers

and the tufted vetch is starting to pod, even as it's still in flower

Lovely to see plenty of common carder bees

Maison de Moggy

This afternoon I met up with a friend and we visited Maison de Moggy, Edinburgh's Cat Cafe.

It's a lovely place, designed for maximum feline enjoyment

And with lovely quirky details, like this sign for the passage to the litter traysnext to the water fountain

 While we were there the cats were quite chilled out and sleepy

Sebastian 

 Jacques

 Alain

 It's a lovely place for a relaxing tea break (there is an excellent selection of teas and cakes - I had a pot of wonderful Chocolate Abyss tea, which contains real chocolate, and a very rich chocolate brownie). You pay an entrance fee for one hour and for that hour, it's just the one group of people in the cafe, which makes it very sociable, people all wander round photographing and petting the cats and chatting to each other as they go.

It's very popular at the weekends and during the summer months, so it's best to book in advance, which you can do on their website. 

You can also get loyalty cards....

A few things about Treacle the Cat

Treacle our Cat is a very special cat. He's a two and a half year old rescue cat from the Edinburgh Cat Protection shelter in Leith, which has a small cattery housing several cats and kittens. Treacle had apparently been a bit of a bully in his four months there, always chasing the other male cats! With us though he is adorably affectionate and very fun loving.

He's a very beautiful cat, his dark grey fur has black tabby markings running through it, but if you run your hand through his fur, it's white underneath. He has mismatching paws - two short white socks, one long white sock and one entirely grey leg! His wonderful colouring really shows up when he lies in the sun.

Originally Treacle came from Tunisia! The shelter don't know really how he got from Tunisia to Edinburgh.....

Treacle likes to drink water from a tap or from a mug, rather than from a bowl. He sometimes uses his paw to eat. He loves playing, today he spent about twenty minutes pushing round a small piece of carpet (which we hope he'll use to scratch on) trying to find a ball we'd made from reused aluminium foil. He likes to 'help' me as I weave oblongs for his cat blanket.He prefers to play with the wool that I'm working with, rather than the ball of wool I've given him specially to play with.....

We'll be keeping him as an indoor cat as we don't have reliable access to a good garden and we live close to a busy road.  Indoor cats apparently live longer and are (obviously) less likely to be run over, attacked by other animals, kidnapped or pick up illnesses. They're also much less likely to kill local wildlife.

On a sunny day

Lovely, warm and sunny at Musselburgh today. Here's what the John Muir Walkway looks like at the moment

Lotsof bees, butterflies and other insects in amongst all those flowers. This lovely butterfly is a green veined white

and this is a caterpillar of a chamomile shark moth. (I wouldn't have known this myself, but I bumped into another woman who was, like me, walking slowly along the flower verge looking for insects to photograph)

and this ladybird was hiding away, but it's colour gives it away

Of snails and soldier beetles

I spent today at a snail identification course today. Organised by Sustrans (the sustainable transport organisation) and held at Water of Leith Conservation Trust, this was a course intended to guide the beginner through the process of identifying snails. Or at least that was how it was billed and everyone on the course was a beginner. However, I don't think I was alone in feeling that the course was pitched at too high a level, both given our level of present knowledge and the practical uses to which we hope to put the training (for example, when I do my weekly patrol for the Water of Leith Trust, I won't have the time to check every patch of vegetation and leaf litter for tiny snails, whereas I am more than happy to keep an eye open and record the more obvious species). It was fascinating to look at the tiny snails under the microscope and challenging to use a key to identify them to species level, but it might have been more helpful to have started by taking a relatively easy species and using it to demonstrate how to use a snail identification key. Even for people who have used biological identification keys they can be very tricky, particularly if you're trying to identify species of a group you're not very familiar with.

Anyway, we had a pleasant wander along part of the river to collect some snails to identify. The group altogether found around ten different species of snails in quite a small area and took them back to the Water of Leith Visitor Centre to identify them before releasing them back into the wild.

Here are two common garden snails, the smaller one is a youngster

It was interesting while we were out and about to see what else we found while looking for snails, lots of wood lice, lots of slugs (of several different species), a few centipedes and lots of red soldier beetles. These three seemed to be very busy

Yesterday I took this more artistic photo of a red soldier beetle on a harebell

You can of course, click on the photos to see them larger size.

Beyond Expectations

 

Beyond Expectations, a theatre show from Untold Theatre revisits Charles Dicken's classic great Expectations and re-tells the story from the perspective of Estella.

The story starts with Estella as a youngster, living with her mother, a passionate gypsy and her father, Magwitch, a drunk who beats her mother. She is then taken into the care of Miss Havisham, during which time she meets Pip. Although Pip loves her, she coldly rejects him, flirts with many other men and ends up in an unhappy marriage. Miss Havisham taught her well how to destroy men's hearts, demonstrating by ripping off the wings of a moth. At the same time though, she never taught Estelle the art of self preservation.

It's really interesting to see this well known tale told from a different perspective, though I felt it didn't really give a huge amount of insight into Estella as a character, over and above what we already know from the novel.

That aside, this is a wonderful production. The use of music and film add a great deal of atmosphere, whether it's restless ocean or scudding clouds or the forbidding gates of Miss Havishan's Satis House. The acting is consistently excellent and there is a good balance between humour and pathos. There's great attention to detail too, for example, I loved the puppets that were used to represent Estella and Pip in their very young years.

So all in all, a definite recommendation if you don't know what to see in the mass of theatrical possibilities that is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

Information on the show: 

• 7 - 15 August 2015 at 4.10pm (Run time 50 minutes)
  
  Forest Theatre, Greenside Venues
  Southbridge Resource Centre
  6 Infirmary Street
  Edinburgh EH1 1LT
  
  Tickets £8 (£6 Concessions). Ages 12+

  
  Book online: tickets.edfringe.com.
  Phone: 0131 226 0000
  Visit: 180 High Street, Edinburgh

Disclaimer: I received a free review ticket for this show. 

This review first appeared on my Shapeshifting Green blog yesterday.  

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Lo! Jacaranda by Harry Freiermuth

Harry Freirmuth's Lo! Jacaranda: A Spanish Gypsy's Conte Jondo (Deep Song of the Caves) a novella set in the 1760s follows the life of Jacaranda, a privileged young Spanish woman.When the Spanish Inquisition reveals her gypsy heritage, she is ordered to be burned at the stake.

In this simply told tale we follow Jacaranda as she passes through the prison system then escapes on a boat to America but is then sold as a slave. She's bought by a missionary who sets her free and employs her on his mission.

Though simple, the story offers many insights into the way of life of gypsies and native Americans and their relationships with the church and other communities. In some senses parallels are drawn between the experiences of the gypsy communities with that of the native Americans.

There are some lovely descriptions of the natural world:

It was spring. Some fields were covered in a waving display of bright yellow mustard plant blossoms. As we passed through the welcome shade of an oak forest, I could see patches of yellow poppies. The next hillside would be a spread of brught blue lupine. 

The book is beautifully illustrated with Freiermuth's own gorgeous, atmospheric oil and watercolour paintings of the natural world.(The best part of the book for me).

Lo! Jacaranda by Harry Freiermuth, published by Trafford.  

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book.