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It was reported today that Edinburgh City Council has topped the UK league table for credit card expenditure for public bodies with a sum of £355,000 as an average spend  for each of its 171 cards!   This puts it way top of the league of card expenditure with the next highest being Kent County Council with a meagre £108,400 per card.

With the sun still with us it seemed like an opportune time to investigate the recently erected tented village at George Square.

Half-price preview tickets for the hugly popular Edinburgh Military Tattoo at Edinburgh Castle go on sale tomorrow morning (10am, Monday, 25th July). The preview performance is on the 4th August at 9.30pm.

The crowds were out for the Edinburgh Jazz Festival Mardi Gras in the Grassmarket today. After weeks of overcast, wet weather, and the recent deluge that, in Morningside, saw flash floods washing cars down the road and pedestrians wading waist-deep up the street, the festival organisers must have breathed a collective sigh of relief that the event was not another wash-out.

So far Edinburgh City Council has only put up some £27 million for the ill-fated trams project as all the rest of the money raised thus far - £500 million - is coming from the Scottish Government, that we have all contributed as tax payers.

One of the side-effects of this unusually dreich Edinburgh Summer, is that there have been fewer people meandering around Edinburgh's parks. Take Castlehill garden: I was walking in this rough, unkempt hillscape, smack in the middle of the city under Edinburgh Castle, a couple of evenings ago. The only sign of life, apart from the distant hum of buses on Princes Street, were a few rabbits munching in the undergrowth.

In spite of its hills, Edinburgh's compact size lends itself nicely to the pedestrian. Anyone of moderate fitness can walk from one place to another quite easily within Edinburgh's New Town and Old Town and a little more energetic stretch of the legs will transport you beyond the centre to outlying Edinburgh areas such as Leith, Murrayfield, Stockbridge, and Newington.

John Carson, who has long been opposed to the way that the Edinburgh trams project has been managed and run by Edinburgh City Council and Transport Init

The end of the road is still some way off, but after several hours of debate late into the evening on Thursday, at 11.15pm the Edinburgh Trams turned a corner. The Liberal Democrat dominated Edinburgh City Council voted to continue building the Edinburgh tramline into Edinburgh City Centre.

There were some memorable moments, but the Edinburgh Film Festival 2011 was generally a lacklustre, disappointing affair, that looked like it was cobbled together at the last minute.

With the crucial Council meeting tomorrow (Thursday 30th June) on Edinburgh's Trams the members of the Council are still in the utterly ridiculous situation where they are being denied the facts on which to make a decision concerning what is probably the most complex engineering project in the United Kingdom at this time. Unless they sign a confidentiality agreement they are barred from seeing the figures behind the recommendations - and these figures are so distorted that they have provoked an outcry right across the city.

The other stand-out piece for me at this year’s festival was the grim post-apocalyptic movie by French director Xavier Gens, The Divide.

For me the stand out movie of the Edinburgh International Film Festival was Troll Hunter.

With Edinburgh City Council's crunch vote on the future of the trams due on Thursday 30th June we should at least agree on the name of the destination. Of the three options, the one recommended by the authors of the Edinburgh Tram Project report, is to build the tram into the City Centre.

Following the outcry over the anticipated cost overruns for the crisis hit Edinburgh trams project, Alex Salmond today in first minister's question time called a public inquiry into the project "an excellent thing to do". Salmond and the SNP did not support the trams from the start, and have kept their distance from the project and its ongoing woes, saying it should be dealt with by Edinburgh City Council.

Edinburgh City Council is due to meet on 30th June to decide on what direction to continue with the Edinburgh trams project.

I've just come out of a screening of 'My Brothers', thought it was a lovely little movie from first time writer Will Collins and first time director Paul Fraser.

On Day three I decided to catch up with the actual films of the festival and try to leave the critical theory behind me for a day.

My second day was almost entirely consumed by the day-long symposium that was Project: New Cinephilia. This seminar-esque attempt to create meaningf

The latest Edinburgh City Council press release claims that the Council "have balanced their books again