Yesterday I met a gentleman who lives on the south coast of England. He regularly drives from there up to Scotland – a hellish journey that I used to undertake regularly before moving to Edinburgh. I am sufficiently ancient to remember the days when the trip was enjoyable and can even recall attending an all-night party in London and driving the 550-odd miles to Oban immediately afterwards. Those were the days. Now it can take three hours to get past Birmingham.
My new acquaintance has a solution. For his next Scottish visit he will first take the ferry from Dover to Calais. Then he has a short drive to Zeebrugge in Belgium from where he will take the Superfast car ferry to Rosyth – a mere fifteen miles from Edinburgh! That’s what I call lateral thinking.