Mouth of the River Ness, Inverness, the Beauly Firth, and North Kessock. From the Kessock Bridge, on a beautiful (but chilly) morning. All is blue... after yesterday's general election.

The good news was the result for Scotland. Out of a spirit of inclusion, we allowed one seat each of the old guard parties, but thankfully not the Ukip lot, and regrettably not the Greens. We've done the total annihilation thing to the Tories before, so they wouldn't have been surprised by that. I remember that night well, and the shock from the radio announcers as each of the formerly safe seats went, one by one. Michael Forsyth, who up until then was the Secretary of State for Scotland, was the best of the lot. A glorious occasion.

A work colleague recently told me a tale of said Mr Forsyth (now a peer), when he came to the official opening of a factory he was working in. They'd just had another large extension/expansion, with a lot of foreign investment from the parent company. He, the Secretary of State, had stood on the wee podium, and instead of giving the expected general kind of speech, to the workers and managers, had a rant about the (then minority) Nationalists, and the dangers they (allegedly) presented to business, and such investment. The management persons from abroad looked at each other in a concerned manner, as if to say, "What have we done? Did you know about this?" Needless to say the regular investment from abroad ceased, and it was not anything to do with the Nationalists.

The above is a polite version of the tale, and doesn't capture the gritted teeth, and tone of the original teller.