It was like another country.....

Last Friday Paul and I flew to Glasgow for Paul’s old primary school friend’s wedding.



We had to pick up a car and drive to Dumfries and we stayed at this B+ B – it’s was an old regency-style house that is still part of the estate of Charles Stuart. I’m confused as to whether that is Charles I, Charles II, or Bonnie Prince Charlie’s estate. Anyway, it was a lovely old place, run by an Anglican priest David and his partner David. They had a Bichon Frise called Bertie, which was actually a lot more fun than it looked. I think I offended David and David by asking if it was poodle. Bertie escaped on the afternoon we left, so we had to chase him through the village, trying to get him to jump into the car.





David the priest was telling us about the history of the house – and how the land around the house was given to the Stuarts after the dissolution of the monastries. It’s incredible to think that someone would be handed all that land because of their friendship with royalty. Sweetheart Abbey originally owned of all the land in the estate and was destroyed as part of the dissolution.



I do like staying at bed and breakfasts, but to be honest, after 3 days of a full Scottish breakfast, I reckon I had consumed my egg and pork product allowance for the month. To top it off, we were given roast pork for dinner on Saturday night, which was delicous, but by God I was sick of pork by Monday morning.

Bizarrely, we were given a full airline meal on the way up to Glasgow and on the way back. It’s strange because my flights to Stuttgart which are about 2 hours, you’re lucky if you get a sandwich, sometimes it’s just a packet of ‘drink snacks’, but on the 50 minute hop from Glasgow to London, we were treated to real airline food. V strange.
Surprisingly, on the trip back I had two mishaps with my boarding pass. I dropped my first, presumably when I was subject to security for the sake of the war on handcream. After getting another printed, I then proceeded to drop that in the loo. Oh well.

We didn’t want to fly and tried hard to get a train up, but it was going to take about 9 hours, so we reluctantly flew and waved goodbye to several endangered species as we did.



The wedding was good fun – but quite small with about 40 or so people there. We did ceilidh, which reminded me of dances at secondary school (minus the student with bad BO of course). The Scottish guests were very patient with those of us who constantly got things wrong…..There were lots of ginger people there too, which was handy, as I’m to be surrounded by them in two weeks.