A day in Edinburgh

Edinburgh is very nice when it's sunny. Or so it seemed for the twenty minutes that it was sunny. We walked up to the castle, then walked down towards the railway station, and the first drops of rain began to fall. We carried on, all the way to the Scott Memorial, which looks like some spiteful anachronism in the middle of town. All around it are gleaming, shiny buildings, and then there's this evil, blackened talon stabbing up at the sky.

There's an obelisk (the Nelson Monument) in the other direction, which seems to show that the people of Edinburgh like things that stick up in the air. Then again, I wouldn't want to blame Londoners in general for the Shard; perhaps Edinburgh is the victim of tall pointy objects.

We started to walk back up the hill, to find something to eat. The first pub we went into had a sign stating it was the winner of the 2009 best pub award. It was almost empty; four customers watching the tennis in silence, in a room that had an indelible, inarguable smell of urine. It was one of those places where you wished smoking hadn't been banned so the stench would be masked. We couldn't wait for smoking indoors to be relegalised so we carried on up the hill and ate at an Italian restaurant. That's because we love to engage with different cultures and always eat the same cuisine regardless of the country we're in.

The rain intensified. We left the dry environment of the restaurant and walked back towards the hotel, stopping at a hat shop so I could waste a woman's time by trying to find a trilby enormous enough to fit my enormous head. Even after getting my hair cut today, I still don't fit into any hats designed for human beings rather than cave trolls.

Then, back to the hotel, and my wife crumpled into a heap while I began to catch up on the mound of work I'd left in Singapore, until my brain and the internet connection both vanished, and that meant it was time to sleep.