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Just a few bits and pieces from the astonishing variety of cars, bikes, engines and trucks on display. That Vincent HRD was enough to make a grown man cry. And the Land Rover Carawagon is a proper camper van…

Having snaffled the last steak pie available this lunchtime from Herds the butchers in Aberdeen, I confidently asserted that this was the finest pie of its type I had ever tasted, and that the future of Scottish tourism rested on The Great Steak Pie Trail. Tom Morton Show listeners being noted for their interest in…

Rocketed up the road in fine weather from Glasgow, stopping for breakfast and a massive supermarket shop at Tesco in Dundee. It’s a Tesco Extra, and they have catering packs: tons of pasta, rice and gallon cans of cooking oil. Roll on the advent of Tesco in Shetland, I say. Fill up with reasonably-priced diesel,…

In full after-dinner entertainment mode at the Old Pulteney Grand Prohibition Ball (see below).Meanwhile, I hate BT. Not their employees, and certainly not their engineers, who are fine folk. It’s the management. They make you pay extra for business lines, then, when you try to report a fault, make you go through residential faults, who,…

This is just an example snap of the trip south on the Inverness-Perth stretch of the A9, which I’ve been driving for 35 years and remains a nightmare of frustration and terror, no matter how much meditative calm I try to instil in myself. Caravans! I will never have one again. Camper vans! I’m selling…

…at the peak of the herring fishery. And 800 gallons of whisky consumed per week. Last night’s Grand Prohibition Ball at the Old Pulteney distillery tried to revive that tradition…the songs went down well, especially the specially-written ’45 Pubs in Wick’. And over £5000 was raised for the RNLI.Forty five pubs in WickIf you need…

Wick Heritage Centre looks fairly innocuous from the outside, but once you open that plain black door you step into another world. It’s virtually an entire terrace of Georgian houses (and outbuildings) and it is, without any doubt at all, the best ‘amateur’ museum I have ever seen. Run entirely by volunteers, its contents supplied…

A pretty lumpy crossing from Shetland to Orkney last night, but we arrived at 10.45pm, 15 minutes early. That gave the satnav plenty of time to thread me through Kirkwall and to the Murray Arms at St Margaret’s Hope before it shut. Up early to catch the 8.00am Pentland Ferries ‘short sea crossing’ to Gill’s…

The camper van has failed its MOT on three things: unaligned headlights, emissions (it’s not got a catalyser) and worn ball joints. Minor, really, but enough to scupper my planned expedition south and provoke a flurry of ferry alterations and hotel bookings. So tomorrow it’s the Citroen that’ll trundle off the Hrosseyland and onto Orcadian…

There’s a story over at the Sunday Herald, jumping the gun on figures due out tomorrow regarding drinking (of alcohol) in Scotland. I find myself in the peculiar position of being a semi-pro drinker (in that I get paid for writing about whisky) who is beginning to realise that enough is well and truly enough,…