Off to bonnie Scotland for the Calcutta Cup and what larks upon the way!  I collected Junior Nurse from a house in Sheffield which I was slightly surprised to discover is not unlike Tunbridge Wells.  Whatever happened to the dark, satanic mills that my parents warned me covered the countryside north of Regents Park? Is there no relief from the creeping fingers of gentrification?   I was greeted at the door by a woman in hair curlers covered by a headscarf which unfortunately I assumed to be the normal local daily dress but turned out to be a post-Stalinist joke on cultural appropriation.  Fashion and despair.  Again.

We got to Staff Nurse’s lovely home to discover that another guest had arrived before us.  A gentleman of the road, as we used to call travelling folk,  who she had met whilst tenting in the Outer Hebrides.  How many, many times must I repeat the dangers of canvas related shenanigans?  It must be confessed that for all out metropolitan nonchalance we were mildly discombobulated to observe that he was wearing our hostess’s skirt and tights;  his clothes, including a negligee from Anne Summers,  having gone straight into the washing machine.

In the HUGELY unlikely event that I were ever to consider packing for a  cycling trip to the Cairngorms in a very snowy February, hoping to hone my igloo building skills,  this might be one item I could do without, what with weight being an issue but then what do I know of such matters?  Bear Grylls has a lot to answer for.

Having seen him safely on his way we decided to watch the England-Scotland rugby match in Edinburgh.  Arriving in the capital Junior Nurse insisted that she must do a tour of the city in an open topped bus, an obvious, first class choice for a mid winter afternoon in a location north of Moscow.  Being of considerably sounder minds we declined to join her and set her a second challenge: to locate us after her outing, should she survive it.  We then decamped at some speed to the Cafe Royal, which is a bit more like a pub than a tea shop, actually quite a lot more, if accuracy is required.

A first class afternoon ensued, which if truth be told did not actually involve going to the match, (This a plan we had abandoned some time earlier, not having tickets and it being extremely cold) but it was apparently viewable on a television somewhere behind the bar.  Thank God Scotland won which meant that the day ended with high spirits rather than mayhem as we were probably the only English people present and we still had just enough sense not to,start a fight.

Junior Nurse did eventually locate us, using the unexpectedly intelligent reasoning that we would be A. In a pub and B. Very close to where she left us. Respect, Sherlock.

If technology permitted I would have liked to have finished with a photograph of the bloodied axe on the kitchen floor, worryingly a true detail of a very surreal weekend,  but perhaps that’s a story for another day.