DON'T say this column didn't warn you. I foretold that Edinburgh would be struck by one of its deadliest afflictions since The Great Plague. Tramcarnage.
Beginning to bite deep now. And it will get deeper as these sweaty summer months slip by.
Beware road rage. Beware pedestrian paranoia. See how our bus services will be axed. Watch how fares could be upped again.
All to do with a tramway system
that nobody on the street seems to want. As I've said before, stop and ask the streetwalkers and bus users if we need trams and nine out of ten, 19 out of 20, will respond with an emphatic no.
All craftily engineered by a select team of people who craftily created what's developing into prolonged chaos. Tramcarnage. Can they please stand up and be counted and tell us, exactly, what's in it for them?
Meantime, a pox on the plotters.
Speak to us, Vlad You mean to tell me that . . . truly, madly, deeply . . . Vladimir Romanov still needs an interpreter? Big wheeler-dealer on the European stage, for long involved in big business in Edinburgh, countless visits to the Capital and, apparently, he still hasn't got the language?
The thought struck me as I watched him, replete with interpreter, interviewed at length on TV the other evening. If he can't afford a private tutor, no doubt the city council can squeeze him into a further education evening class.
You'd think that Vlad the Impaler, banker, dancer and Laird of Gorgie and Dalry, could hustle some coaching, for free, from son Roman, the English-speaking chairman and chief exec of Hearts FC.
By heavens, I'd coach him myself but maybe he'd have problems with my Foot-of-Leith-Walk English. My Lithuanian's not too clever either.
Afterwords . . . . So newsreader Trevor McDonald isn't the stuffed shirt we think he is. He has come out, revealing in a magazine interview that he always knew it was bound to make the papers that he can polish off a bottle of wine – a whole bottle – when he gets home of an evening after facing up to the autocue.
The old devil. There had to be more to Sir Trev than the uptight bore who hob-nobbed with the Duke of Edinburgh.
The full article contains 382 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
