Back to school

Younger lad's choice of dinner out this evening to mark / celebrate the end of the holidays and start of the new school year tomorrow.

He wanted venison (!) so we checked the menu at a local pub (The Old Chain Pier, between Newhaven and Granton), booked, got there to discover we'd been looking at the winter menu. So he had dressed crab & Parmesan crisps, sea bass, lemon posset.

Aren't you glad I told you!

Here he is as we left the pub, admiring the sunset, Fife and Inchkeith Island behind him across the Firth of Forth.

Does he look thoughtful? Yes, indeed, as he was contemplating the prospect of admitting he had (yet again) lost his bus pass, and this time his bank card too!

Here's a potted history of that distant scrap of land (less than 1km/Sq.), which would have been a better reason for a thoughtful demeanour.

Inchkeith: where in 1493 King James IV left a dumb woman to raise two children in order to discover what language they would 'naturally' develop; to where Edinburgh Town Council in 1497 banished sufferers of syphilis until they were healed (presumably they died); where the English army built a fort during the Rough Wooing in 1547; where the French had a garrison in 1555 in the time of Mary of Guise; which her daughter Mary Queen of Scots visited in the 1560s; to where Russian sailors with an unnamed disease were similarly banished in 1597; visited by Boswell & Johnson in the 1780s; turned into a lighthouse island by Smith & Stevenson in 1803; turned into a naval fort in the 1880s; a foghorn base in 1899; turned into a radar and anti-aircraft station in WWII; returned to the Northern Lighthouse Board in 1956; a farm in the '60s; new foghorn installed 1958; Lighthouse keepers withdrawn and the island sold to Sir Tom Farmer (Mr Kwik-Fit) in 1986.
(Honesty demands that i acknowledge Wikipedia as my source, and thank the contributor. I only wish I could carry all this in my own head).