Contrasts

Tonight, my friend Melissa Perri is doing her UK book launch at the Craiglockhart campus. It’s in the Lindsay Stewart lecture hall, a modern, silver extrusion from an original building.

Inside the lecture is starting. There’s no pizza - but beer and crisps. The closest thing to actual food is a ploughman’s-lunch-in-a-packet. I thought it was just cheese & onion flavoured crisps, but it turns out to be a diy set - a triangle of processed cheese, two cream crackers, a plastics spreader, and three tiny pickled onions.

Thence to Haymarket whence the Kinghorn train has been cancelled. Instead I take the fast train to Kirkcaldy where Hamish collects me. We Slooten past the ambulances and police cars, heading for the enveloping quiet of Kinghorn beach.