A walk by the river

It's been an awful week for various of our friends: one sudden death, two serious cancer diagnoses, one horrible family problem - all very sobering. So we went for a walk in the sunshine to take advantage of being alive and in reasonable health because you never know what's round the corner. All these spring flowers were encouraging.

The red kayak is presumably for using in the Water of Leith, which is yards away from this house.

These are "colonies" flats- not sure if these are a peculiarly Edinburgh phenomenon. The upstairs flats, which are often two storeys, are accessed by outside steps down one side of the building, while the downstairs flats have ground-floor front doors on the opposite side. So there are two "front" gardens, one for each flat.

This is the back of the New Town. Doesn't ivy get everywhere? After the world has ended for humans, I think ants and ivy will rule. Oh, and perhaps lily of the valley - in my garden, anyway.

This house backs on to the river as well. I like the way it's been added to over the years, with various little nooks overlooking the water.

I bought some anemones at the wine shop. It's a rather strange shop: it has shelves stacked to the ceiling with very expensive wines inside and buckets of beautiful flowers outside; as if it were two shops in one. The shopkeeper is very silent, though maybe he's chattier if one's buying £500 bottles of wine rather than a wee bunch of flowers.

Anemones are only ever fleetingly available here. I like to put a vase of them under this painting of anemones. It was painted by an ex-colleague, an art teacher who gave up teaching to paint full-time, many years ago.

And tulips. Comfort from simple pleasures.

Thank you for all your novel suggestions. I started by ordering "The Poisonwood Bible" from the library and it's come in already. I must say that the title isn't very alluring... but it's been on the list of books I felt I should read for ages and this has given me the impetus to do so.