Edinburgh

From Edinburgh airport there are more than 45 flights a day to London. And, I imagine, the same number back. You can fly from Edinburgh to London Heathrow, -London Gatwick, London Luton, -London Stansted and London City — even to the optimistically named -London Southend. Glasgow offers a similar choice. I have often used these flights. I live about 25 minutes’ drive from Gatwick, so when I go to Edinburgh my -favourite plan is to take a morning train up and then fly or take the sleeper back. Since Manchester is bigger than Edinburgh, I had naively assumed that I would be able to do something similar for an upcoming

There isn’t a Scottish politician in living memory who hasn’t been on the Caledonian Sleeper. I always imagined Donald Dewar folding himself up in his berth, he was so tall. He was notoriously sniffy about the company he kept in the bar and once recounted the horror he felt when — stuck in snow — he was forced to fraternise with practically the rest of the Labour front bench for 22 hours somewhere south of Carlisle. Journalists tend to be more comradely. The other night, I took the sleeper in tow with an old family friend, the BBC reporter Allan Little. Over Glenfiddich and cheese we exchanged scurrilous gossip and

The fracking debate has been brought to a new heat by David Cameron’s message to Home Counties nimbyists and eco-crusties that he wants ‘all parts of our nation’ to share the shale gas bounty, not just lucky northerners. But the argument is proceeding in almost total ignorance of how the controversial extraction technique works and how soon it’s likely to happen. So I asked one of Britain’s top energy executives this week whether shale is really the game-changer it’s fracked up to be. It certainly looks that way in the US, he said, because gas-based energy costs have been cut by two thirds, energy representing 10 per cent of all

If you have nothing to do, are suffering from stress, and wish to be rendered comatose, I recommend that you get interested in the efforts being made by Edinburgh Zoo to mate its two giant pandas. The zoo has thoughtfully installed video cameras in the pandas’ enclosure so that we can constantly watch them online and marvel at their sloth. I had my laptop tuned to the ‘Panda Cam’ throughout the weekend and checked it from time to time to see what the pandas were up to. The answer was never anything at all except for sleeping or eating. Often there was no panda in camera shot; but when there