EVER tried growing your own cabbages? A life-enhancing experience may be just ahead of you on a patch near you. I urge you to get out there, forget the flowers and get used to the idea of smelling the veg in Princes Street Gardens and other public parks in the city.
There's talk, believe me, of digging them up and replacing the blooms with carrots, lettuce and beans, turnips and spuds.
Parks chiefs in London have caught on to what's happening in other great cities, Chicago and Havana among them, where the lo
cals are learning to feed themselves, increasingly growing their own veg on council land. Model allotments in, for instance, the vast Regent's Park, will show what can be achieved.
Picture it now. Prize Brussels sprouts and runner beans where the Floral Clock used to be. Other initiatives include planting fruit and nut trees along roads.
One might suspect the people behind all this are themselves fruit and nut cases. Tomorrow: how to grow your own rhubarb.
On the buses Who needs trams when Edinburgh has a perfectly adequate bus service? Make that perfectly inadequate. Sunday at the West End passengers were left stranded, standing around for close on half an hour, waiting like idiots, at stops with not a bus in sight.
No sign, no nothing to indicate that they were being bypassed, specific stops were "inoperative". Did Lothian Buses give a damn? Forget the bus, get those trams on track ASAP.
In the swing . . . The ever-enlightening, an entertainment in himself Peter Alliss (we didn't get enough of him on Sunday) on the absence of Tiger Woods from the Open: "In a way it has detracted not having Tiger there. It's a bit like going to a concert to listen to the world's best and the virtuoso violinist isn't there."
Afterwords . . . . . You won't find them in the Fringe (they damn well should be) but you can catch the local Alex Yellowlees Band doing their own jazz thing at the Acoustic Music Centre, Orwell Street, on August 9 at nine. Veteran Alex is the talented fiddler, clearly an aficionado of Grappelli and Reinhardt. Essentially hot stuff. Info on their new CD, Life Changes, at www.alexyellowleesband.com
The full article contains 380 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
