After dinner today, Camilla and I considered watching The Cat from Outer Space, a 1978 "cosmic comedy" about, I guess, a cat from outer space. However, as we will be leaving Edinburgh in approximately 48 hours, we decided to go for a walk instead, and see if we couldn't find a nice new café, so that we could be all annoyed about how we spent so much time in Edinburgh and never visited it.

We decided to focus our attention on Marchmont, an area of town I've seen quite frequently, as the 41 from the city centre to King's Buildings pass through there, but which I never really spent any time in. It looks really nice, though, and it's just at the other side of the Meadows from here, so it's really the perfect place to go for a walk.

As it turns out, there are lots of cafés in Marchmont, but most of them where closed. One who was not, however, was Toast. As I said, I haven't really spent much time in Marchmont, but Toast is situated right next to one of the stops of the 41, so I have seen it plenty of times, and I imagined it probably sold toasties or something like that, and had it down as not very nice. This turned out to be all wrong, and it was in fact a very nice café/resturant, with a nice menu, if not particularly cheap, a seemingly decent selection of wine, nice atmosphere and good taste in music. Today we only had coffee and tea, and they gave me a cafetiere which despite my best efforts only produced the weak coffee that seems to be so popular these days, but it tasted nice, if not very much, so I've decided not to hold it against them. In fact, I might insist we go back tomorrow for dinner.

In the mean time, I am of course bitter, as I have probably gone past the place in a bus more than a hundred times, and never thought about it twice. There is nothing for it, except getting a job in Edinburgh and buying a flat in Marchmont.

-Tor Nordam