Red and Amber

This morning I was up at 7:15am so that I could drive to Perth in time to drop the car off for a service at the garage in Perth at 8:30am. Having done all that, and faced with two-and-a-half hours to kill, I decided to walk into Perth town centre (30 mins) in search of a Costa Coffee, an all-day breakfast roll and a small cappuccino. All of this was grand, if a bit boring. And all the while I was checking the rugby score on my phone, which was a tad depressing but not - let's face it - unexpected. Things began to worsen when the garage phoned to tell me I needed a new front offside tyre (£194.64). Again, a tad depressing but not entirely (en-tyre-ly?) unexpected. The real problems began when the time came to head back to the garage. It was raining quite heavily by now so a bus was the only realistic option. A ridiculously helpful parking attendant on Scott Street told me where the bus station was, but then a ridiculously unhelpful driver at the bus station told me that I needed to hop on a 23 to get to where I needed to get to. It was when the Number 23 started heading north on the A9 towards Pitlochry that I realised there'd been some kind of misunderstanding. I got off the bus at the Perthshire Visitor Centre at Bankfoot and called a minicab to get me back to Perth. By this time it was 11:20am and the garage was due to close at 12, so the first traces of panic were starting to manifest themselves in my demeanour. However, Ace Taxis were swift in their response to my SOS, and I managed to get back to the garage by 11:55am. I paid the minicab driver £16 and the garage £464 and began the drive back to Edinburgh only to encounter a queue of motionless traffic on the M90 at Halbeath. I estimated it would take about an hour to get to the Forth Road Bridge from there, so left the motorway at Junction 3 and headed for Kincardine Bridge, which I reached - after fighting my way through heavy traffic in Dunfermline town centre - at 1:15pm. There was a bit of a queue to get on the bridge, so while I was waiting for the lights to change I took this picture.