Growing pleasures

Comparing apartments and rent in Dublin and Edinburgh is never going to come out in favour of the Irish. Scottish flats are considerably much bigger, comparatively much nicer, undisputably better, and definitely cheaper than anything on offer in otherwise delightful Dublin. The kitchen in current residence The Castle of Comely Bank is for instance covering approximately the same area as the kitchen AND living room in The Shire in Dublin. Another added bonus is the garden. Yes, there is a garden, and while it is not exclusively private to The Castle, I have repatriated a vegetable patch and a flower bed, as well as taking hold of most of the lawn.

So a new world has opened up, the world of gardening. Sunday was spent in blissful and blistering sun, digging up roots and chucking out old rotting leaves, burying centipedes and millipedes and spiders and other living things (I don't know if that is the way to do things, but I figure it may make good compost, if they don't survive being buried alive?), and generally getting my fingers dirty. The Irish writer was set to mow the lawn with the lawn mower, which until now has mainly taken up space in the workroom and served the very useful purpose of making me feel like a proper grownup. Proper grownups have lawn mowers - and really proper grownups (pensioners, even) have vegetable gardens.

This is previously unchartered territory for me, past experiences limited to successfully harbouring a basil plant in the kitchen for several months, and celebrating one tiny tomato after months of hard labour and hoping for sun. I now face a world of top soil, seedlings, drainage and fertilizer; there is a whole universe of plant varieties, acidic soil and not so acidic soil, germination and harvesting, and I face all this with a blank mind and a very optimistic attitude. Is it a good thing that the soil was very, very dark when I finally managed to clear away most of the old roots and dead plant growth? Are you supposed to clear out all of the old roots? How do you distinguish between your own weedy looking mangetout plants and murderous, vegevorian weeds that needs to be removed? The 8 different vegetables that are now lightly rooted in the little patch outside, together with a variety of herbs, will hopefully in 12-15 weeks end up as delightful sweetcorn, broccoli, turnips and carrots - and if they don't, I had a blast trying. Counting on a heavy loss margin, anything edible that comes out of this will be a bonus, but in the meantime I'm proud as a hen mother every morning when there hasn't been overnight massacres by the surviving centipedes, or general death by exhaustion for those little, lovely green things.

Plant on, I say, plant on.

Book me some time

Even if Edinburgh is an electrifying place to live, I've still sometimes struggled to get the deep, warm, good Saturday feeling that used to come very easily in Dublin. Maybe I've just grown lazier, or maybe Edinburgh is just bigger and hillier to get around - or maybe I just haven't found that something that ticks the Saturday box perfectly. Now I think I have, and I'm all the happier for it. In fact, this has potentially been the best weekend here so far, and the sunny and warm spring weather only has some of the credit for it.

One of the reasons: Yesterday I had my first shift in my new weekend job, at the excellent, first class second hand book store in Stockbridge, run by Shelter, a charity for homeless people. My involvement is purely voluntary, non-paid and charitable (in case anyone was worried that I am prone to moonlighting). Or, when I say charitable, I may have to admit that my own motivation is mainly selfish - although Shelter does great work, and I am looking forward to learning more about that too - because this shop is a haven of great finds. There are two charity book stores in Stockbridge, and I have of course researched both extensively. Oxfam is great too, but the selection in Shelter, and the amount of quirky finds available is much bigger. So I expect the new job to be having a substantial negative impact on my wallet, as one of the great things about sorting the shelves means that you find all the hidden treasures, but a very positive impact on my general state of happiness, as well as on the general state of my bookshelves. And on my friends' too - I've already found a cute edition of Grey's Anatomy for my soon-ish-to-be doctor friend, a Geek Chic book for the Skyscanner office (for all of the flight geeks there!) and several other secret gems that I will share with the people soon.

It is a great way to spend Saturdays. Finally, years of organising my bookshelves in various ways as my mood changes (alphabetically, by geographic origin, by theme, by publisher, by size, by colour...) is paying off bigtime. I spent 3 hours tidying books yesterday, and I have rarely been happier. Those are two of my favourite things in the world - tidying and books - and with the additional bonus of wonderful people and a level of conversation you rarely get anywhere else, I think I have found the perfect Saturday engagement. Did you know what the collective noun for starlings is? I didn't (also, I may have mis-heard at first and thought the noun in question was the collective for Stalins...) - but thanks to the wonderful extensiveness of second hand dictionaries, a well educated man in tweed has enlightened me: it is indeed a murmuration of starlings. So there. I am already looking forward to next weekend, and to the vast expanses of knowledge that lies before me in this pearl of a place on Raeburn place. Pop in if you're around!