Back to earth with a bang

I knew I was going to find it difficult to return to Dunoon and all that that implied - two-way roads, yelling yoof in the night, rain that falls all day without respite - but hadn't thought of the additional burdens imposed by life in the 21st century. Before the rain set in, incidentally, it was a glorious night - the photo shows Oban as we sailed into the bay at 10pm last evening - and didn't actually grow dark at all, as I saw the last remnants of the sunset segue seamlessly into the dawn around 2.30am.

But this morning the first sound I heard after the alarm clock was the faint but unmistakeable noise made by an Orange Walk. This lamentable display has been a feature of the first day of the school hols for several years here; it takes place early, presumably to avoid confrontation, and this year it sounded like one drum and a couple of flutes. So as Northern Ireland at last shows signs of hope and cooperation, we know that there are still bastions of bigotry alive and well and fluting in Scotland. Great.

And then in the afternoon we hear that there has been a terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport. It would seem that this may have been carried out by people who were not, I imagine, Orangemen. Less harmful, maybe, just to bang a drum in a wee town's main road at nine in the morning. But banging the drum of bigotry is a dangerous game, and we live in dangerous times.