Urban Leopard

This week I've been thinking about a leopard. Not my favourite of the big cats, but nevertheless there's been one lurking round the edges of my mind, peripheral but persistent, refusing (in the way of cats) to coalesce into anything like a useful metaphor. A ghost leopard. Is it there because I visited the zoo? Not so much - it was there before that, and I was mostly hugging the warmer enclosures, like the aviary and the tiny monkeys, not quite managing to take photos in focus. (I need a new camera. Well, I want a new camera.) No, this isn't a zoo leopard. It's an urban leopard.

I spent a few days in Edinburgh this week - an escape in the opposite direction for me, since I normally head for heath and hills sort of thing when life gets too much, somewhere where I can slow down and fall into whatever it is I'm needing to write. But this time it was the things I was needing to write that I needed to escape from, and the city seemed perfect. Hustle, art galleries, museums, shops and bustle. Sitting in coffee shops reading. Not writing.

It was wonderful! Thank you Edinburgh.

And now, if I could just figure out what I'm supposed to do with this leopard ...

Cheers, Joan.

P.S. December's Wikio Top Blogs Ranking (which now seems to be calling itself Ebuzzing, for reasons unknown to me) has come out - thank you again for all your visits to this blog which have bumped me up 10 places to 46 in the Culture category and 3 places to 22 in Literature. I don't pretend to understand how it works, but it certainly produces a warm fuzzy feeling in this writer's toes.