Five things you need to know today
Edinburgh Tool Library
Edinburgh Tool Library has a cycling project to get people on bikes and keep them there by showing them how to maintain them by using the tools in one of two libraries. Now new funding means the project can continue.
Asda offers Kids Eat for £1 all year round
Asda has announced that its hugely popular ‘Kids Eat for £1’ café meal deals will continue to run in its café including 26 in Scotland all year round and not just during the school holidays.
The supermarket also refreshed the kids’ café menu last year with more nutritionally balanced meals, including new vegan and healthy options and in 2023 served more than 115,000 meals in the two-week Easter holiday period.
The supermarket launched the offer for kids under 16 to enjoy a hot meal in any of their 205 cafés in June 2022 and has now served more than 3 million meals to children all over the UK. The initiative stands apart from the many other retailers who offer similar, as the meal comes with no hidden extras such as a minimum adult spend.
The kids’ menu has a variety of offers including dishes such as Penne Pasta with Meatballs and a vegan Hidden Veg pasta meal, alongside firm favourites fish fingers, chicken nuggets and the all-day breakfast, there is also the option of swapping out chips for a salad or peas.
In addition, children will receive a free piece of fruit such as and apple, pear or banana when purchasing the hot kids £1 meal deal.
City Centre West to East Link
A new cycleway has opened between Roseburn and Charlotte Square. The ambition is for the segregated route to continue along George Street where it will join up with the unjoined up cycleways at the far end of George Street down on to York Place and somehow on to Leith.
Our report of the opening is here.
But Blackford Safe Routes which organises bike buses to James Gillespie’s Primary School (for the last five years) and which was firmly driving the Quiet Route from there to the Braids has listed their reasons why this is not actually a finished product and some of the things it simply does not do.
Read this thread here.
Makars’ Court
Lauded Scottish Gaelic poet Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir (anglicised as Duncan Ban Macintyre) has had an inscribed flagstone unveiled on Wednesday at Makars’ Court in Edinburgh.
Duncan Ban now joins the illustrious company of Sir Walter Scott, Rabbie Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and others at Makars’ Court where Scotland’s literary greats have been enshrined since 1988. He is widely acknowledged to have formed a key part of the golden age of Gaelic poetry in the 18th century.
At today’s ceremony there were speeches from Culture and Communities Convener, Val Walker along with Chair of Ionad Gàidhlig Dhùn Èideann and Professor of Gaelic at the University of Edinburgh, Wilson McLeod. Dr Anja Gunderloch also from the University and an expert on Duncan Ban also spoke.
There was also a moving rendition of the poet’s songs from musician and singer Mary Ann Kennedy, one of Gaelic’s foremost modern exponents. The event was concluded by a touching bagpipes performance from Andrew MacIntyre, a descendant of Duncan Ban.
The flagstone contains the following text:
Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir (Duncan Ban Macintyre)
1724-1812
‘S e mùthadh air an t-saoghal
An coire laghach gaolach
A dhol a-nis air faondradh
(A change has come upon the world
That the fine, beloved corrie
Should now be desolate)
From The Songs of Duncan Ban Macintyre (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1952), pp. 176-77.
The sponsor for the flagstone was Chair of Ionad Gàidhlig Dhùn Èideann and Professor of Gaelic at the University of Edinburgh, Wilson McLeod.
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