Caustic comments .

I'd never heard of Soul Cakes until the dog walking lady who lives in the house next door to the village hall said she was baking a batch . They are, seemingly , an old Scottish Halloween tradition. Such has been the demand that she is taking orders to raise funds for the local food bank. I say we'll take half a dozen. 

The traffic lights by the university library add a little colour to an otherwise exceedingly grey morning. This mundane observation says a lot about life on the North Sea coast as October melds into November.  Pumpkins are now appearing everywhere. The students are loathe to let any excuse for a party go unrecorded. For some reason pumpkins seem to appear in twos. 

A pair of rather crudely carved examples can be seen on a bench that runs down to the lecture theatres. There is a sign Sellotaped to the window behind the bench that informs us that ' this window is not soundproofed'. Is this a way of telling students sitting on the bench that their lecturers might over hear their caustic comments ?

On our way back to the car we see a light glowing in the chapel window.

On the inside the choir are practising. We sit for five minutes, in the warmth, and listen to them. Seems we are getting close to Christmas concert season - snippets of Auld Lang Syne and O Little Town of Bethlehem  mark the start of our day.

Yet more rain overnight. Even by Scottish standards this is unusual. LNER are again stopping their trains at Edinburgh. Is this a prelude to them halting all train services to the North or is it an excess of caution ? There is a small Land Rover Defender parked next door to the Volvo. Angus wonders if we should buy something with better ground clearance. 'The Font' thinks that a vehicle with a built in ladder that enables you to clamber onto the roof is perhaps not what we're looking for. Even though it's only got two doors it fills up the parking space so it's probably not the most practical choice for town.