Until Thursday,

last week had been an exact clone of the preceding one. We viewed flats and episodes of 24 with more or less equal frequency, the latter compensating to a degree for the former. Then, out of the blue, we got a phone call from the landlord of the most promising flat, offering us a lease from the start of February. Winner! RF HQ will soon be transferred to the upper crust haven of Stockbridge.

We celebrated on Friday by heading along to Henry's Cellar Bar to watch The Scruffers, one of Dochan's current projects. I used to rather cynically wonder if this kind of band reciprocity was the only thing that sustained the live music scene in Edinburgh; we don't exactly have a King Tut's or 13^th Note to which the musos reliably gravitate. My cynicism was dismissed entirely by The Scruffers and then the headlining Dropkick, both of whom were excellent. Doug, Davis and Giancarlo were also in attendance, and we talked ad Ash's nauseum about recording, gigs and sundry band-related topics. Along the way we got pleasantly mortal and finally got home around 2 am.

Next morning at 9 am we hauled ourselves out of bed to meet the new landlord and I (literally) sorely wished that we'd exercised a little more restraint the previous night. A bracing walk down to Stockbridge sorted us out; the landlord was oblivious to or tactfully ignored the eye-watering reek of stale alcohol emitting from us both, and we regrouped in a coffee shop on Raeburn Place.

Stockbridge is a curious little place: because of the low buildings along Raeburn Place it gets a lot of sunlight (relatively speaking; this is Edinburgh, after all) and feels very village-like. Then, walking back up the hill to Princes Street, you look back and are struck by the opulent Georgian residences overhanging the Water of Leith along Dean Terrace and suddenly the "New" New Town hoves back into view. Despite having quite prolifically traipsed around some of Edinburgh's more salubrious areas of late - Regent Terrace, Cumberland Street and the like - I had never been able to work out where the hell all the money to build block after block of such monolithic, elegant architecture had come from. Realising it was probably the Empire diluted the restrained elegance with a touch of self-serving pomposity.

A bit like that last paragraph really.