Perth

Nearest accommodation we could find was “The Famous Bein Inn Hotel”. Under new management, it had just had its head chef walk out when we arrived. For the next two nights’ stay, we were both reminded of the joy of not being in the hotel business anymore: staff not turning up, staff not knowing what they should be doing, taps and showers not working, even a bedroom door having to be broken into as we left. Exhileration. Then we started feeling sorry for the new incumbents. Without exception on our travels around Scotland, without staff from Eastern Europe the burgeoning Scottish tourism industry would be withering. It is already creaking …

We visited Scone Palace, traditional kingmaking location for all Scottish kings. Scone is pronounced “skoon”, so I had delight in ordering a scone with jam and clotted cream from the cafe, asking why it was pronounced so. The young lady serving didn’t know. And she was a local.

Ventured thence to the street where Ingrid used to live and informed her the shop around the corner, which her uncle used to own, is now a Londis. She thought that was v funny.

Quite liked Perth, preferred the bigger, older Stirling, some 20 miles away.

Just before we left Scotland, we visited the Heritage Lottery Funded canals refurbishments at Falkirk. The Kelpies are two Celtic sea horses in steel, about 35 feet high and straddling the canal, immediately next to the M90 motorway.

Better still, The Falkirk Big Wheel, some five miles up canal, is an ingenious solution to connecting two canals 75ft apart. That’s vertical separation. If you’d seen the graphic story behind it, you wouldn’t believe it, except we did on the hoarding around Dundee’s coming V&A (opens this September). Luckily, Indoors did anyway.

Back in England