At 1am last night David Greenberg and I were discussing on the phone what we could do with the Earl of Kellie's Reel (it wasn't quite so late in Halifax, NS), and in the course of the conversation he played a couple of bits to me to show me what he meant.  It wasn't until some time later I broke off mid-sentence to say 'wait a minute, how did you do that just then?'  I'd never heard anyone hold a phone and play the fiddle at the same time before.

Yesterday was unexpectedly exhausting, not because of the heavy snow fall, but because a lot of Scotland's drivers seemed completely unaware that snow on the road should make any appreciable difference to their driving.  So a succession of accidents on the Edinburgh City Bypass kept us there for a while, and the usual 90 minute journey home from the environs of Crichton took seven hours (with a stop in the middle when it all got too depressing).  At one point, after a Frank Sinatra-like moment when I was concentrating so hard on the road I forgot to turn the windscreen wipers on for the blizzard (which movie is that again?), we were being followed just a bit too closely by some guy in a car going just a bit too fast. When he finally decided to overtake, we were going downhill towards a roundabout, and he completely failed to stop at it, despite the fact that his wheels weren't turning any more. 'Thanks buddy', I thought, 'if you'd done that five minutes ago, you'd have run into the back of us, and assuming we were all still alive, we'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere'. There are times when it's hard to have charitable thoughts towards some people.