Is there a special, awkward person in your life? Are you still looking for exactly the wrong Christmas present for them? How about sourcing it locally?
Broughton is full of creative gift options, and most of these unusual examples have featured in our pages over the last 12 months.
Pictured right is a work by Ingrid Nilsson, whose beguiling ladies – be they seductive, mysterious, moustachioed or frankly potty – are exhibiting now at Bon Papillon on Howe Street. Here Nilsson is one of two artists in residence and, with husband Stuart, hostess of a first-rate café. A curious mix of beauty, strength, and incipient madness set amid delicate decorative detail, nearly all her subjects have the most enchanting eyes.
The Water’s Edge is local author Jane Riddel’s third novel. The former NHS dietician and health promoter (‘Chocolate is my only vice’) explores the minefield of family life in a serious examination of secrets, jealousies, and new understandings set on the shores of an Alpine lake. We previewed this spring in Issue 217.
How many times have you found yourself on a No. 8 bus and thought, 'I wish I had something about me to dry all this wet crockery in my pocket'? Then treat yourself and loved ones to a Keith Thompson tea towel, featuring many of your favourite Broughton locations and on sale at Curiouser and Curiouser.
Bill Dunlop featured back in July (Issue 220). His memorable debut – Playing the Air – is a fast-paced crime caper which gallops through the capital’s folk music scene and the paranoid politics of Edinburgh under the all-powerful Dundas regime of the 1790s. Look out for a splendidly named character: The Omnivore.
Does your home lack an enormous bronze head? You should contact Pilrig Street’s Andrew Kinghorn, whose 15 sculpted self-portraits were exhibited to great critical acclaim back in March (Issue 217).
Among other things, John Hein (below) is well known locally as Chair of the Leith Central Community Council. He has also been a memorably down-to-earth political candidate. In May’s Issue 219 we highlighted his collected correspondence – Railtrack and Other Letters – in which he unhelpfully deploys deadpan pomposity against the forces of Corporate Stupidity.
Sean Johnstone returned to Broughton from the Isle of Man on a trip to revisit the various haunts and stamping grounds of his youth. One such was the Broughton Street premises of his father’s shop (Model Motoring – now Narcissus), where Sean lived briefly in a tiny backroom hardly big enough to swing a Christmas Tree. A disastrous fire ruined much of the stock, and the business closed in 1990, but a few pristine examples of the Corgi die-cast No. 8 bus survive and are for sale. Find out more in Issue 218.
If it’s 1960s sounds, soul, classic rock, world music, hip-hop, reggae, soundtracks, folk, metal, blues and jazz or original 1970s rock and prog LPs, punk 7” singles, heavy-metal picture discs, heavy vinyl reissues, CDs or DVDs you’re looking for, Vinyl Villains is the best place on Elm Row to start. In total, there are over 10,000 items, and, for the true enthusiast, T-shirts featuring obscure icons such as the DJ Howlin' Wolf and the 1971 Gong album Camembert Electrique. See Breaking news (23.1.13).
Birds, British ones and their history, are the subject of the Rev. F.O. Morris’s A History of British Birds, for sale in Le Troubadour on Henderson Row. It has featured twice before here in Seasonal Snapshots 4 and 14. Pictured below is a turtle dove.
And finally, for anyone with an interest in 19th-century Broughton, medicine, snails or sexual congress in cemeteries, the novella ‘Melting’ by Spurtle’s A.J. McIntosh is ideal. Published in the anthology Strange Tales, Volume III, a few remaining copies are available direct from Tartarus Press.
