Edinburgh to Elgin today.
We started the day with the customarily huge hotel buffet breakfast. I had smoked haddock and scrambled egg and sausages and bacon and then had to sit quietly for a while, dreamily drinking coffee and enjoying the world until I felt able to stand up.
In a perfect world I would have gone back to bed for a little snooze then, but of course we didn’t. In fact we had got some time to spare and went off for what started off as a gentle stroll and of course finished up as a trek up the mountain to the castle.
For those who have not been there, Edinburgh Castle is a rocky construction on top of a large rock. It is as inviting as you might expect for a building whose design ambition was to make people think that it would be a good idea not to try and get in to it.
It is grey, elevated, and forbidding, bits of it have been used as a prison over time. As far as I could tell it hasn’t ever been conquered and frankly I am not in the least surprised. We walked up to it slowly, puffing and panting and stopping for occasional little rests. I can tell you that if I had been wearing armour and obliged to carry some heavy lumps of sharp steel and also dodge arrows and boiling oil I would have been very keen not to bother at all.
Once you get there it is all Scottish history, which is a bit like English history in patches, but has got people like Robert the Bruce in it. We had an interested potter around the gift shop, and bought a very splendid jewelled thing to hang on the Christmas tree next year, it was made to look like the head dress of Mary Queen of Scots and will add some international flavour to the decorations, along with the black lace Eiffel Tower.
We looked at the museum of the Scots dragoons, and the cells where they kept the prisoners of war, and the Scottish Crown Jewels. These mystified me because I didn’t know that the Queen got crowned twice, and certainly looking at the crown it was not designed to be worn on top of her other one.
There is also a stone, which the Scottish have as a sort of floor-level version of a crown, you cannot be King or Queen of Scotland unless you stand on it. As I recall the English pinched it once and they have only recently managed to get it back, but none of the displays mentioned that, so maybe I am thinking of another one. Certainly there was no shortage of stones, they were everywhere, including several enormous ones in the gardens at the bottom of the hill below the castle, which, to my captivated fascination, seemed to have fallen off: so maybe they have got a few in reserve.
We hung about for the One O’ Clock Gun, which was a very satisfying pop, and then walked down the Royal Mile, which was ace, absolutely everything you ought to have in Scotland. There was a man playing the bagpipes, and a shop that sold tartan things and a man in furs with a blue painted face, and some people holding owls. Oliver held one as well, which cost four quid but made him grin, so we decided that it was well worth it.
After that it was time to start again on the long journey North. The very jolly men on the door of the hotel kindly warned us about practically every speed camera between Edinburgh and the North Pole, which we thought was lovely, and helped a great deal with my personal journey of warming to the Scots, sooner or later I suppose I will have to forgive them for the fraudulent deceitful time wasting expensive recipe for the fudge that didn’t work.
It was a rather beautiful journey, actually. The sun shone, giving the skies that brilliant clarity you get as you go further North. We drove to Aberdeen, through miles and miles of hopeful red-brown ploughed soil, dotted with tractors and the occasional solid-looking farmhouse, and thought how very big and empty the place is, there must be three or four windmills per head of population.
Out hotel in Elgin is plain and economical, in a sort of Spartan long-way-from-anywhere sort of way. We ate a dinner which was largely a choice of things in batter, which I understand is a Scottish tradition, and then retired upstairs to watch Braveheart on the computer in order to give Oliver some grasp of Scottish folklore. He liked the bit best where somebody was shot in the bottom with an arrow, which may not have been the right appreciative spirit.
Tomorrow is the visit. Possibly the most decisive moment in his short life so far. He has speculated about possible swear words he could employ in his interview for personal amusement, because at the end of the day he is more like Numbers One and Two Daughters than I like to think. I have promised him a merciless death should he even consider it.
Fingers crossed.
