Basement revelations

Two little crumpled scraps of paper have come out of my jeans pocket. They are evidence of last night out on the town in Edinburgh.

The best travel experiences are those random happenings; things you don't expect that you really have to just go along with. It happened to us last night. We were both slightly grumpy arriving in Edinburgh. A bit more than slightly, maybe. We'd had such a lovely time in St Andrew's, I guess whatever happened next was going to be something of a come down. It took us an hour or so to drive to Edinburgh, and about another hour to find our way the kilometre or so from the city outskirts to the hotel in the city centre where we were staying. I think I am doing pretty well on my navigator duties so far this trip, but once we get to the cities with their impenetrable ring roads, one-way systems and unmarked streets, I am quite useless. A bit like the city centre maps in the A-Z road map book we are using. When we finally pulled up on the yellow lines outside our hotel, we were both stressed out, tired and cranky. The hotel did little to soothe us; it's big, impersonal, unhelpful and slack on the service front. Just ask Sandy. PLUS, they charged £18 for parking, thereby eliminating any saving we thought we were making on the bargain room rate.

To lift ourselves out of our glum mood we decided to go out for a drink before coming back to the hotel for our (part of the package) dinner. We wandered into the tiny Scotsman's Lounge; a real old-school pub which, although just off the tourist mile, was full of lively locals. It was lined with photos of pipe band teams and furnished with large barrels and small stools. It was not long before we got talking with a couple of women sitting next to us. Scottish people are much more friendly and curious than English people in this regard. They're interested in where you're from, what you're doing, why you're there, and what you've seen. Like Kiwis, they seem intensely proud of their homeland and keen to share the best bits of it with visitors. We started talking about rugby and Sandy mentioned he was once friendly with a Scottish rugby player who played for Scotland. The woman we were talking to was amazed. "I know him!" she said. "He taught at my sister's school!" She immediately phoned her father, and within 10 minutes we had the phone number of this person, whom Sandy had not seen for 20 years. Small world.

While we were sitting in the Scotsman's Lounge, a young man came up to me with a flyer. "We're doing a gig down the road", he said. "I'm playing this amazing instrument, the kokudo (or something like that - to be honest I can't remember exactly what he said); it's a drum you sit on". He was so enthusiastic, just like the pretty girl with him who said she was the singer, that we decided to go along and check it out.

Cabaret Voltaire is literally and underground cellar-like space down the hill from the Royal Mile. When we arrived our band had just taken the stage. They were great; the singer had a gorgeous soulful voice and a lovely personality on stage. Our guy on the drum, which looked pretty much like a plywood box, was very energetic and the sound coming out of that box was quite impressive. They had a great acoustic sound which was really quite commercial. After their set we got talking (it was a pretty meagre crowd) and we found out that the bass guitarist, Tim, was married to the singer, Esther, and the drummer was her little brother. They were trying to forge a career independently by getting play on iTunes and MySpace; They were thrilled we had come along. We both thought they deserved to be huge, so you read it here first; if in a year's time Esther has a worldwide hit, we'll be able to say we saw her in a basement with 20 other people in Edinburgh. In the meantime, she has a web site: www.estheroconnor.com.

The band asked us if we wanted to kick on with them to another bar, but we were flagging and, just quietly, a bit pissed, by this point. We mooched back to our hotel where we enjoyed the world's most expensive ham sandwich from room service before tumbling, less grumpily, into sleep.