Heat

I woke up yesterday morning to the radio telling me firemen had been battling a blaze in a restaurant on Victoria Street. That's very near the shop. I ran through the possibilities - there are a few places on the street, and I've eaten in most of them over the years.

It turned out to be Khushi's, a fantastic Punjabi restaurant who have been going in Edinburgh, in various localities for a long time. They had spent a lot of time, money and effort fixing up the building they had moved into, and it looked great. The fire had gutted the restaurant and the roof has caved in. A real shame.

When I have nightmares now, it tends to be about the shop. I had one recently, one I'd had before, where I got to the shop in the morning to find it completely empty - no stock, no shelves and so on. The level of theft in the dreams varies from just a few big items to absolutely everything - sometimes including floorboards.

I've been here for eleven or so years now, and in that time we've had the ceiling collapse, been flooded twice and had a few smallish incidents of shoplifting. Maybe not too bad, I suppose, but each event felt terrible at the time. A couple of Decembers ago, I got a call from Ryan, who'd just arrived at the shop following a Christmas break to find a huge flood from a burst pipe. The floor was under an inch of water; it was pouring into the basement, and it was still coming, at quite a rate. I got there before the plumbers, after a very quick 30 mile drive. It was horrible, but it all got sorted out eventually. The though of losing the place to a fire scares me rigid. I wish the Khushi's people all the luck in the world.