I had a gig in Edinburgh on the 26th and I hadn't realised that the 25th was, in fact, a Bank Holiday. I looked for somewhere for us to stay on the Friday night, so we could make a weekend of it, and found, on lastminute.com, a reasonably priced hotel. The hotel, though, was a castle. How cool is that!?



It's like an old family estate that has been adapted into a hotel. It was a good looking hotel as well. We set off for Edinburgh a little later than planned and arrived at the hotel in late afternoon. The plan had been to enjoy the grounds of the hotel (if that was possible) and then head into Edinburgh to get a ghost tour (friends of mine work on the ghost tours and they're very good). Evening ghost tours are the best, hence the idea of going the night before. It all starts to add up now.

First thing we did on arriving at the hotel is lie down for a minute... well, a couple of hours. We just had a long snooze. It seems that the previous weekend's exhaustion was still present.

After the snooze, we got up and headed into town. A meal was found on the Royal Mile and then we did the ghost tour. It was very enjoyable, though we didn't see any ghosts. We were hoping to find a ghost on a bicycle, but sadly there was not even the faintest trace of one.

After the tour we went into the Scots bar of Nicol Edward's. This is a room where I've had some of my finest moments as a stand-up. Actually, that's not true anymore, but it once was. It was a place where I cut my teeth and enjoyed gigging. A man on the stage there had the guitar I wanted - the Stratacoustic. Actually, I wanted the Telecoustic, but it's basically the same guitar, but with a different shaped end.

Late night chat with our tour guide eventually led to a need for more of the sleeping thing. So, off we headed to our castle. Perhaps we'd make more of it the following day.