There are Borderers who heave up to Edinburgh airport to fly down to London. They say it is quicker than the train.
The time in the sky may be less than the time on the train but if you add up the effort to get to Turnhouse then the time in from He
athrow or Gatwick, I think it is no contest.
I jump on the GNER bullets at Berwick and I'm at Kings Cross in three and a half hours, mildly smug and well fed – and for a fraction of the cost.
Anyway, that remark is a prelude to reporting my two coincidences of the week.
I was summonsed south to attend a memorial service for a person I loved. I bungled my understanding of London geography and came out at the wrong tube station. Worse, locals gave me entirely dud directions.
The time for the service was drawing close so I did what I never do – I hailed a taxi. I explained I was close to missing an event for which I had hurtled from Scotland. He dropped me at the synagogue and, amazingly, in a kind gesture declined to take his fare. He ought to be reported.
Huffing and puffing up the steps I was held back by two security guards and a policeman.
"Excuse me, sir, are you a terrorist?" they enquired with mock courtesy.
I suppose the balaclava was a bit of a clue plus my dishevelled slightly sweaty state. I satisfied them I was a late-running Scot rather than anything more dangerous but only stumbled into the event as the doors closed.
I staggered to the only free aisle seat I could see and tried to calm down and catch my breath. I turned to acknowledge my neighbour in the next seat. It was Margaret Thatcher.
After some sublime poetry, songs and tributes, I found Lady Thatcher and I both sobbed our way through the Kaddish. I was moved further by this as she has no Hebrew but understood the meaning.
I like to think she recognised me. I was a lowly courtier but she managed to retrieve my name from her memory and, as we parted, I got a kiss. Rather more than I deserved but we both held the mourned one in the highest regard and the rabbi singing unaccompanied had broken every heart.
Coincidence number two. Later that evening some friends were taking me out to a curry house near Victoria. Within a few minutes of sitting down, an elegant figure took a table nearby. It was one of those people who chose to fly to London, my neighbour, Lord Steel of Aikwood.
What are the odds on the two tower occupants up the Ettrick Valley migrating south that day then sitting next to each other in same restaurant?
He was disconcerted. I was disconcerted. After some pleasantries I let him munch on with his companion. As a diligent journalist I tried to eavesdrop upon their conversation but failed to get the thread of their conspiracies – something about Campbells, I think.
I am reprimanded by David White of Lilliesleaf for suggesting our farmer's cascades of subsidies may invite ribaldry when the Scottish Executive publishes the cash details paid to every farmer later this year.
Mr White's well argued case is that without these market-rigging efforts we would be open to an insecurity in supplies from abroad. He also argues that the Border hills would not revert to native woodland as I suppose, and hope, but be a bleak sea of bracken and saughs.
I can only point to the agreeable venture of Scottish Borders Forest Trust which is quietly seeding patches of the long-suppressed Ettrick Forest to evident success.
Its Carrifran woodland project on the cusp between the Tweed and Esk watersheds strikes me as one of the happiest ventures in all the Border counties.
Perhaps Mr White is correct. Woodlands will not return entirely spontaneously. Yet they can be brought back with a little bit of husbandry.
After the vast forests that used to dominate our Uplands are restored the job will be incomplete without the return of the long absent animals by Scottish Natural Heritage – the beaver, the moose, the lemming, the dormouse, the wolverine, the seaga, the northern vole, the bison and perhaps most romantic of all the lynx and wolf – specially trained, we trust, to eat farmers.
I'm assured they are very tasty with or without their subsidy gravy.
