Rabbit, rabbit....

As I walked down to the Spey at 6am this morning, I met a woman with a dog. She stopped for a chat (behaviour which always amazes me - nobody in Edinburgh talks to you unless they've had a formal introduction and are sure that you went to the correct private school.)

"Ah," she said "You're an early riser just like me. It's in your genes I think...that need to get up, come outside into the natural world and just absorb the beauty of nature. To see the mist drifting slowly over the river, to watch the sun stretching its rays gently through the trees, to hear the wood pigeons talking to each other....it's just magical, isn't it?"

I agreed. It sounded a lot less bitter than telling her that the only reason I was prancing around the river banks at that time of day (middle of the night in my opinion) was because my friend in the adjacent bedroom snores at a volume only ever before achieved by a hippo trying to mate with a tractor. And I couldn't sleep anyway, because my pillow is ridiculously hard. (Perhaps cast iron bedding is fashionable here on Speyside. I blame Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.)

Anyway, I met this little fellow and hundreds of his siblings. They didn't speak to me though. I don't think they were impressed by the school I went to....