Today it is raining, again, in Edinburgh.

I am driving down to Ayrshire to see the Kennerleys. That means going west towards Glasgow, where we will catch a plane back down South on Saturday.

Stan and Bev, my parents, loved Scotland. When they visited us in 1991, we joined them on a tour of the Highlands, before visiting the Loire Valley in France. One thing both Scotland and France historically had in common, in architecture, was their love of the turret and tower. In Scotland this style is know as Scottish baronial. And both countries had strong links to the Papacy. Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1567) was raised in France and was Queen Consort of France for a blink of time, before returning home to Scotland the year after her husband’s death in 1561. Of course, down South in England her cousin Elizabeth I, who beheaded her for treason, was head of the Church of England founded by her father Henry VIII.

Stan the Man loved to drive. He loved to be at the wheel of either a car or a boat. This meant that driving holidays were just that: hours of driving with ‘wee’ time with your feet on terra firma. You had to eat your food and drink your drink at record speed at ‘pit stops’ in order to get back on the road again. Dad had a tight schedule to maintain and we managed to tour the whole of the Highlands in a weekend, including Lochness (no monster seen), the Isle of Skye (home of Richard Corrie’s clan on his maternal side – the Macleods) reached by ferry, Inverness (where Dad bought yet another clock to add to his collection), Balmoral (the Queen’s residence) and back down to Edinburgh.

I remember crossing over a high point in the Highlands and unexpectedly finding snow and skiers whizzing down slopes. Where there was no snow, the bleak landscape was, at times, covered in pinkish/lavender heather. It was a majestic, stirring and melancholic landscape. At times Scots are described as dour, meaning sullen and gloomy. This is unfair in my opinion. I think that Scots are stern, but living in that environment in ancient times must have been testing. And the men wore skirts, which made it doubly tough.

In years to come, we made it to Scotland on several occasions, apart from our visits to the Kennerleys. We had a very wet summer’s holiday in 1993. We stayed in two turreted mansions. The second one was on the West Coast in Kinloch Moidart. We rowed to a small island on the first day, picnicked and played cricket on the beach. The next day, the heavens opened and rain poured down incessantly for the next week. There were a lot of Scots there, but the Scots that were Geoff’s friends did not speak with Scottish accents. Sloane Scots speak the Queen’s English. Nicky St John was there, smitten with John, who proposed not long afterwards.

I can only say that despite the weather, the landscape is endearing and gets under your skin and the people are straightforward, friendly, good and true. Many of our friends, found through Geoff’s first Scottish friend, Emma, have stayed firm friends. We are godparents to some of their children and three out of six of our children’s godparents are Scottish. That says something.