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Weekend reading: Edinburgh edition

A silly season weekend musing followed by links to some of the week’s great posts.

I am in Edinburgh for the fag end grand finale of the Fringe Festival this weekend, so no links from this morning’s papers I’m afraid. Even my beloved FT [1] will have to wait until I’ve boarded the train at Kings Cross.

Really looking forward to the trip; we’re in the quiet carriage outward and in first class for the trip back, and just £70 for the lot. The train takes five hours, but it deposits you right in the center of Edinburgh, instead of putting you an hour out in the sticks like the budget airlines. And no need to trundle to Luton beforehand, either.

The chap who booked the tickets will be missing his fortnightly plane journey, though. While he’s far from environmentally ignorant, he doesn’t let Al Gore get in the way of his flying. I’d estimate his annual greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to those of the Solomon Islands.

Besides doing his bit for global warming, this chum is also a total maven at booking cheap transport and hotel rooms. I once asked him whether he’d like to write an article now and then for Monevator about these bargains, but alas I’ve known him for two decades and his Machiavellian [2] Alert system skipped straight from amber to red and started wailing.

Perhaps you should be glad of it, because while you’d now be flying to places for a lot less money, you’d also be landing many dozens of miles from anywhere that you actually wanted to go.

I once went on a trip he organized where we landed in a completely different country to the one we were visiting – Norway, I think.

Thanks goodness a train is on tracks, otherwise I’d expect to disembark in Belfast.

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