Ever been to the Powderhall Arms in Broughton Road? I thoroughly recommend it. Not just because they gave me a free shot of Glenmorangie but because it is a very friendly pub where you can play all sorts of board games, read books, play cards and generally relax.

It was number four in a series of six pubs that I took my visitors to on Wednesday night after introducing them to central Edinburgh.

Thursday, inter alia, we had a very interesting tour of Holyrood Palace. It's probably more than 50 years since my last visit and I'm sure that there were still traces of Rizzio's blood on the floor then. They've been cleaned up since and a 3,000 piece silver dinner service has been added to the crockery store but I imagine the rest is much as it has been since it was built aeons ago. I'm sure there was a conducted tour in the past but now there is an excellent audio gadget available in numerous languages to hang round your neck and listen to as you go round. I was pleased to find that I had not made too many errors in the potted history lesson I delivered before we got there. I think I got a couple of King James mixed up but since there were seven of them I don't think that's too bad.

We gave the Parliament a body swerve and slowly worked our way up the Royal Mile, stopping to visit and admire the Canongate Kirk in front of which as you may know there is a statue of Robert Fergusson. There was a girl there handing out flyers for a walking tour in which she takes you to various places that figure in Fergusson's poem "Auld Reekie" and explains and declaims the poem en route. I'm very keen to take the tour but didn't feel that the Swiss would be as taken with it as they were with the brown sauce that accompanied the very tasty pokes of fish and chips we treated ourselves to. So I've noted it for a future selfish treat.

We eventually got to the castle having been diverted by a bed of nails fire eating sword swallower on the way but thankfully were too late for the last entry of the day. That gave me an hour to put my feet up at home before heading for The Boat for a Tempest rehearsal and then back up to town for some more nightlife with my visitors.

Friday saw my traditional tour of Fife. We head out to the road bridge, stop for viewing if I feel like it, which I didn't, then take the coast road through Inverkeithing, Aberdour, (stopping at the viewpoint), Burntisland, Kinghorn, Kirkcaldy, Dysart, the various Wemyss, Buckhaven, Methil, Leven and Lundin Links, arriving in Lower Largo for a bracing walk on the beach followed by scrutiny of Alexander Selkirk's statue and a refreshment in the Railway Tavern.

Then it's on again, taking in Kellie Castle if time allows (it didn't) to Anstruther where fish and chips from the Anstruther fish bar is de rigeur. They claim to sell the best fish and chips in Scotland and I have no reason to quarrel with that claim. We walked to Cellardyke and watched with some amazement a youngster pop a dozen golf balls into the sea with a 7 iron. I hope he found them all under gorse bushes and didn't half inch them from his father's golf bag.

Next and last stop St Andrews where we walked a bit of the Old Course, checked out the castle and the cathedral before rushing back to Edinburgh. It pained me to miss out Falkland Palace but there was no way we could be late for Salsa Celtica. The Queen's Hall was packed to capacity and the band were wonderful. The melange of Gaelic song, fiddle music, uilean pipes and Latin rhythms is extraordinarily entertaining in my opinion. Sabin and I had a lot of fun dancing as we did from time to time when we were unlikely flatmates in El Puerto.

A nightcap at the Steamie to the strains of a band called Lemon something or other brought the evening to a close.