Simple pleasures

I have often mentioned that the thing I love about the UK is the fact that it is so green and it has facilities that allow us to walk as much we would like to. Since the weather has been amazing this past week its been really nice to go sit in the parks here.

One such park-cum-hill is this place called the Calton hill, this is a small hill right in central Edinburgh at the end of the main market street. It’s a short climb but an amazing panoramic view that the hill provides of the city.

The hill has historically been quite a prominent place, it has an amphitheatre which has housed many an open air theatre, a place for tournaments and tilts and strangely enough a place to behead criminals as well. Earlier the hill had the calton prison till the prison was moved to another place called Saughton. In present times the hill is used for multiple festivals and most famous among them for the Beltane Fire festival which is attended by 12000 odd people and also for the Dussehra festival of us Indians. :)

All this sounded really interesting to me, however, what made my high point of the day was the fact that the weather was good and I was able to lie down to my hearts content on the grass and just look at the sky above me. In India I rarely get to go the park and even when I do its mostly crowded, there is no place for me to lie down even if I wanted to. I perhaps wouldn’t want to either coz I wouldn’t be sure how clean the grass was in the first place and secondly I would just be subject to all sorts of stares and moral policing talks.

Such a simple pleasure and yet so precious. I wonder if the people here ever realise that such things which might be so usual to them are so precious to others.

Oh by the way on the way out, we saw Pankaj Kapoor and his present wife Supriya Pathak. They seemed to be accompanied by their crew and were simply standing looking about. Shahid was nowhere to be seen and the team soon left in their cars. I guess they must be scouting out for locations to shoot their latest movie which has Shahid in it.