Inside, Outside, Upside-Downside

INSIDE
From 30 January to 27 February (four consecutive weeks), neither Isaac nor I ventured more than one mile from our home. I'm not sure that I have ever attained this feat before in my life, and I'm not sure that I ever wish to do so again, but it has made me think a lot about the luxuries I enjoy and take for granted, such as travel and hiking (neither of which we did in January, obviously).

UPSIDE-DOWNSIDE
However, perhaps the world (yeah, the same one that hosts the British Open Golf Championship here every few years) decided we were too caught up in the "bubble," as St Andrews is occasionally called, because on the last Friday of the month, some figuratively important people came to town.

Their visit caused many exciting things:
Our lovely quad was off limits for an entire week.
Many, many streets were blocked off for a day and a half.
Policemen patrolled every street quite regularly for at least the day before they arrived.

Here are some policemen guarding the street from the evil schoolchildren:

And the snipers atop the chapel tower:

And the protestor with his sign (just outside the building where I work):

And the (presumably) future queen of the British Isles, though with the life spans of monarchs these days she probably has a good long time to wait:

And a few of my friends hanging out the windows of our office building:

OUTSIDE
ON the next-to-last day of the month, we finally escaped lovely but sometimes claustrophobic St Andrews and went to Edinburgh. There we enjoyed a relaxed and ambling sort of day: we checked into our hotel (with a proper old-fashioned four-poster bed), then had lunch at one of my favourite places in the world, then strolled around the city till we were ready for afternoon coffee, and then enjoyed the sun set.

Here's our view over the Firth of Forth as we sipped our coffee:

And this is the sunset, reflected in the amazing shop windows set up at Harvey Nichols. (The hammer in the latter one is pretty awesome, being made entirely out of nails and hammered-flat heads of nails).

. . . and that's about all for now, folks.