UNCOUPLING

"Jes, for God’s sake you’re going to get us killed!"

Aloft on his mountainous machine the tractor driver bobs along obliviously like only a tractor driver can, while all around him lose their heads and blame it all on him.

I pull back in behind and thump the wheel. We’ve been stuck behind him for 10 minutes! What idiot has fields so far away from where he keeps his tractor? And with all that power why can’t he find a couple of extra gears to make the bloody thing go faster than 35 mph! Can’t he bob any quicker!

‘We’re going to miss this train!’ I vent.

'It doesn’t matter, just be careful!'

It does matter. The fact we’re not going anywhere on it makes no difference. At this moment in time, while looking at the back end of this agricultural road block for the eleventh consecutive minute, getting to the station is the most important thing in the world.

You see, the Flying Scotsman is coming to Dunfermline and we have to be there. Why? Because we go back a long way. When we lived in Yorkshire we’d go and see it often, in pieces, being lovingly restored in the National Railway Museum. Now we live in Scotland and it's coming to see us. When he was two, the eldest fell in love with the thing, and slept for years with a small replica next to his pillow. We pulled it off the cover of the first edition of Great Locomotives of the World. Special offer; the best 99p we ever spent. Such was his devotion that he took the bold move of introducing the Brio version into Sodor, the only non-fictional vehicle on the network.

BEING JOHN SWINNEY

Sitting in the car waiting for the ferry to Ardrossan we saw a bloke in a blue cagoule who looked just like John Swinney.

Surely not.  What would Scotland's Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Constitution and Economy be doing in Broddick?  On a Thursday?  Weren’t there affairs of state to be dealt with?  And what was a man of his stature doing waiting for the MV Caledonian Isles with us half-term, half-arsed holiday makers?  Shouldn’t he be safely stowed in a motorcade of long black sedans with fluttering flags, before being whisked aboard a private jet by a possy of heavily armed men in black suits and sunglasses?

Never one to pass up on a celebrity encounter I got out of the car and walked casually towards him.  There was no one else walking on the pier, so no natural cover to camouflage my approach.  Accordingly I took a wide sweep of his left flank, hoping to catch a glimpse under his hood without raising suspicion.