The days and nights in Edinburgh passed too swiftly: I looked at art*, chatted with friends in pubs and cafes, and walked along the river Leith, pausing to examine trees and ancient houses and millstones jeweled with ivy-leaved toadflax. If cities have souls, maybe this city’s soul is glimpsed along the myriad sunken paths that coursed through its heart, in the beautiful stained-glass windows of its pubs, in every friendly dog that followed its human into pubs and shops and cafes.

The morning after we returned from Edinburgh, we headed to Galway for a funeral. Mass was performed mostly in Irish. Afterwards we supped and drank with the cousins until late, until the cousins wept and laughed in full remembrance of the late uncle.

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* At the National Gallery of Scotland, you could get close to the paintings without someone sticking a phone in front of you. da Vinci! Botticelli! Titian! Raphael! Hogarth! Poussin! Rubens! Reynolds! Frans Hals! El Greco! Van Dyck! Rembrandt! Velázquez!

If I have to pick favorites: Gainsborough's exquisite The Honourable Miss Graham, John Martin's awe-inducing Macbeth, and Jan Van Huysum's gorgeous Flower Still Life with Bird's Nest. *swoons*

There were no paintings by women artists among the 230+ works in the exhibition, pfft.

I liked the explanation for a figural element in Lucas Cranach’s An Allegory of Melancholy (dated 1528): “The group of witches riding in the sky alludes to the melancholic propensity for magic and devilry.”

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