It was a nine hour drive to Scotland, supposedly, and by the time we locked our front door in London, my husband and I were fed up about going anywhere. For one thing, the roof box on top of the car was creaking pathetically, and I had to crane out of a window to keep an eye on it, and for another, we had been awake until 3am that morning, locating stuff like netted midge hats, and a tick removal card illustrated with the types of hostile insects that you might find in the Highlands in July.

Fortunately, somewhere around Heathrow on the M4, all three of our young children fell asleep, and things began to look up. We pulled over in Oxford, at Hamblin Bread, to buy the world’s best cheese scones, chock full of red Leicester and spring onions, and motored north through the edgelands of Birmi

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