The short drive from Edinburgh to Glasgow is a pretty dull one, but mercifully short at just under an hour.
Glasgow was sure to be a let-down after Edinburgh, but with our expectations appropriately set, our arrival here wasn’t the disappointment it might otherwise have been.
There’s no denying that we were very sorry to leave Edinburgh. It’s the kind of place to which you just never want to bid farewell. A full week there probably wouldn’t have exhausted the seemingly endless possibilities for walking the wynds, hiking in the hills and sipping machiatos in cosy cafés.
The weather during our last couple of days in Edinburgh defied the gloom-laden forecasts and treated us to radiant sunshine, mere speckles of rain arriving in the late afternoon. Edinburgh holds its own in the rain, but, pretty much like anywhere else on earth, is best enjoyed in warm sunshine. Highlights of the last couple of days were Calton Hill, Edinburgh Castle and Princes Street Gardens.
Glasgow is an altogether less idiosyncratic city. You could be air-dropped into Sauchiehall Street or Argyle Street and you’d be hard-pressed to tell your surroundings apart from the major thoroughfares of innumerable other British cities. It’s the same homogenised concoction of mobile phone shops, cheap and nasty high street fashion tat, post-modern coffee cognoscenti hang-outs, and fast food dens of iniquity. We all have the inexorable march of globalisation to thank for the privilege of being able to consume the same amorphous pulp at the far reaches of any given compass bearing.
One does wonder what British high streets looked like before the advent of mobile phones and the demise of that most British of gastronomic sins, instant coffee. Frankly, I can’t remember.
We visited the cathedral and the necropolis today, but didn’t do much else. Well, I say that, but I did, in fact, call a lot of hotels to make some bookings for the weeks ahead. This playing-it-by-ear thing is all well and good, but this ‘ere place called Scotland seems to have been discovered by the great unwashed and they’ve only gone and booked everything up in advance, haven’t they? I’m joking, of course. We knew it would be tough to wing it like this, but it’s turning out to be very hard, indeed. A lot of compromises are having to be worked out and made. One wonders if we wouldn’t have been better off if we hadn’t shirked the responsibility of timely planning.
That said, one way or another, most of the holiday is actually booked now, all the way through until 8th August. If I’m counting correctly, we have no fewer than eight ferry crossings booked for that period. In that regard, Scotland requires more logistical planning than many European destinations.
It’s already clear, alas, that we won’t have time for the Shetland Islands, so that will remain for a future trip. There’s only so much you can do in just over a month and that’s all the time we have available. And no matter how much time is at hand for a trip, it’s somehow never really enough. There’s always an extra level of detail in which one would like to travel, but for which there simply isn’t time.
We’ve started Eloïse on pocket money. She gets €1 per week, but while we’re in the UK, this has been converted, strongly in her favour, I might add, to £1. She bought a hair band today, after considerable deliberation. Sarah has expanded on this in her posting.
I had my first taste of haggis today, at breakfast in the hotel. I had expected it to taste, er, offal (fnarr, fnarr!), but it was actually OK. The only time I felt any unease was when I paused to recall the ingredients of the dish, a subject definitely best not dwelt upon.