Edinburgh, November.

Nye: 'Bloody hell, Edinburgh's so cold.' 

Cara: 'Yeah, and the weather sucks too. Badaboom!' 

Every time. (yes, I actually say 'badaboom'. What? I'm cool.) Being rude about Edinburgh and how unfriendly it is (not universally, just mostly) never gets old. But it's okay, I'm allowed to be rude about Edinburgh because truly, deep deep down, I love it. It's my home, the one place that I feel unerringly safe and protected and.... home. I went to primary school and university in Edinburgh, it was the place of my childhood and my first independence and I love it. But it's freezing and when you hold the door open for people they look at you like you're about to steal their handbag. Aside from that, I love it. 

There is a route I used to walk in Edinburgh, from our flat in the south side, when I felt anxious (which was a lot in those days, art school's a bitch) that took me around my favourite places. By the end of the day I was exhausted/calm and ready to go home again. I've been in Glasgow for five years and I've never found anywhere here that does that for me. 

Whenever Nye and I are in Edinburgh I try to arrange it so that we take in one or other of those places. The most child-friendly of them is the National Museum of Scotland. It's somewhere that I've loved since I was little, somewhere I've loved for twenty years, somewhere that I would willingly spend a whole day, just walking and looking and sitting and leave feeling completely relaxed. (Maybe it's all the death? Dead things comfort me. An aside: once the art college took us to the Anatomical Museum at the medical school for a drawing trip. Most people were creeped out by the human heads and stuff but I found it kind of reassuring, like 'look how relaxed they look! One day this shit will be over.' Like I said, art school was a dark time.) It's been almost completely overhauled since my day and for purely sentimental reasons I kind of miss the moth-eaten, Victorian exhibits. The new ones are amazing though, the whole place is beautiful. 

All of that was to say: we went to Edinburgh in November, we took the girls, we went to the museum and some other places I love, it was really nice. We went to the museum again last week, before a wedding we had in Edinburgh, all of our weddings should start with a trip to the museum.