Yesterday was hectic. In the morning I met Anna at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop where she has a residency. I visited her studio, looked at new work, and discussed her research. Then we walked along the Hawthornvale Path beside the Workshop, a trail on sunken disused railroad track that I think winds through the heart of the city, forking here and there, much used and heaped at the verges with flowers and trees and bramble.

At the Royal Botanic Garden we wandered the grounds, cooing at tame moorhen chicks and marvelling at the views of castle and palace, foregrounded by lush canopies. We saw an exhibition by Sydney-based artist Keg de Souza on imperial botanical legacies; one room is hung with reams of orange silk and fragrant boughs of eucalyptus, interspersed with displays of eighteenth-century herbarium samples and drawings of same plant, the latter painted for the East India Company by anonymous artists of South Asian origin trained in the Mughal miniature painting tradition.

Afterwards we walked to the medieval part of Auld Reekie, appreciating handsome stone terraced houses and verdant front gardens along the way, ate grilled Nepalese lamb and dumplings on Cockburn Street (pronounced "Co-burn"), and bar-hopped around the castle. We admired the Art Deco interiors of pubs, listened to Anna's stories of her early years here in the 70s, discussed politics with earnest young coke-sniffing working-class Scottish socialists. After crashing a wedding (I congratulated the dude in the kilt; NOT the groom, to my mortification) and dancing in a basement bar, we argued with a presumptuous English wanker on the tram home.

Needless to say, today's itinerary was subdued: rest and reading.

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Lemsip and Sudafed Day and Night saved my nose. And I didn't smoke as much. Three cigarettes yesterday, each one puffed rather than inhaled. On the site of the Grassmarket gallows, now a square crowded with drinkers, a man said to me, in passing, "That cough will lead to the coffin."

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