IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Trinity Road, ELGIN, IV30 1UF

This window is in the Diageo office building in Elgin. It depicts stages in the production of malt whisky.

Local headquarters of Diageo the distillers.

There isn't much that is green about Lossie Green, which is now one large car park. The red-and-white building is Elgin Community Centre, which looks as tacky inside and out as every other building of its style and vintage. To its right are Government offices.

This town hall is not the headquarters of the local authority, but the town's public hall, used for dances, concerts and theatrical performances. Apart from being a hideous concrete block, it has some serious shortcomings in its internal layout, and it has been suggested that it should be replaced.

This curious mixture of classical, Italianate and gothic was designed as a single storey by William Robertson (1786-1841) as the parsonage for the episcopal church, and built in 1825/6. The upper floors were added between 1855 and 1879. The house was for a time a guest house, and is now the premises of the Trinity Dental Practice. The street was originally North Street, a main thoroughfare from the centre of Elgin towards Lossiemouth, but when Alexandra Road slashed through the northern fringe of the town centre, North Street was cut in two and this corner became a backwater. It was later renamed Trinity Place after Holy Trinity Episcopal Church.

Before North Street was cut by Alexandra Road, these were 28 and 30 North Street.

This was built in the 1960s and replaced a much older and more elegant building which was destroyed by fire. As well as being ugly and grubby-looking outside, the internal layout is potty, with nothing other than a curtain separating the main auditorium from whatever noise is going on in the foyer. The row of daffodils occupies a space where there used to be parking for about a dozen cars, until the council closed it off. (They also painted parking boxes one most of the surrounding streets, cleverly cutting the available number of parking spaces, and now they are wringing their hands because there's a shortage of parking in Elgin.) I suppose daffodils are prettier than cars, but they're not there all year round.

This unsightly collection of portable buildings has sprung up in Elgin's biggest car park for testing people for the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

The underpass allows pedestrians to cross safely between the truncated North Street to Trinity Place. I couldn't quite fit in the full wording 'never far away' because there is a street light right behind me in the way. I do not know what it is that is never far away, and from what, but the tiled surface inside the underpass, and the glass barriers that echo the patterns of the tiles, are a great improvement on the vandalised murals that used to decorate the passageway.

An irregular visitor from northern Russia and Scandinavia, the Waxwing resembles the Starling in behaviour (especially in flight) and is often mistaken for same from a distance. They are pinkish brown in colour and their black wings are marked by tiny wax-like spots of red and yellow.