At Least the Hotel was Nice

The day in Edinburgh was crisp and clear when I stepped over the threshold of the hotel and into the waking solitude of a weekend morning. The city about me still dozed, with but a few shops open. I stopped into a small cafe and ordered a bacon butty (sandwich), eating it while sipping at […]

Why We Do Flights of Beer, Not Whisky

I couldn’t feel my toes. This is why we don’t do flights of whisky. Because by the time we finish the fourth dram (or in this case, fourth ounce) we can’t feel our toes. It’s just too much. I’d made some decisions that led to this moment, such as settling for ice cream (whisky flavor) […]

What Choice Does Any of Us Have, Really?

The Scottish morning was bleak, marked by shards of misty air that cut at our faces, and monotonous low-hung, grey skies that pelted us with sputtering rains. Huddled silently in our seats on the bus, we pulled into the Glen Moray distillery at exactly 10 in the morning, and even the most hearty whisky drinkers […]

In Which I Spend Hours With Strangers

I met Shona, the proprietress, at the door of the BnB in Grantown-on-Speyside, a very green, misty, and placid little burb that slumbers somewhere in the north of Scotland. She asked me how the day had been, and if our bus had been raucous. No, I said, we are not. Strangely our busload of ten […]

In Which I Discover What’s Wrong With the World

I sat down on the bench in front of Canongate Kirk to scour the phone for information about the church standing behind me. It wasn’t yet time for my scheduled visit to the castle, so I still had some time to pass. The church seemed to be closed, but perhaps, I wondered, perhaps the cemetery […]

In Which I Keep Trying New Things

The trip on the underground was supposed to take 30 minutes. That’s what all the apps told me, but I was worried about getting to my train. It wasn’t the subway, but instead I was concerned about the crowds at King’s Cross Station, where people visiting London for the funerary spectacle were most likely to […]