Heimatgefühle

I mentioned a couple of days back the oddness of feeling as if I was 'coming home' on this trip to Abu Dhabi.

Of course home should by all rights be Scotland; but it ain't. Been gone too long, I guess.

Pictured at the left is a true son of Caledonia, Quentin Jardine. My dinner table reading this week in the Sandlands is his latest, "Aftershock", and it's verra, verra guid.

His style is perhaps lighter and less gritty than that of Ian Rankin, about whom I have previously raved in this blog. But in the new opus Jardine scores points with me - he mentions my old school in his storytelling!

Now famous English schools are constantly popping up in fictional narratives. But I didn't attend Eton or Harrow, nor even Edinburgh's sopposed best, Fettes and Loretto. I was a pupil at one of the city's Merchant Company schools, then known as Daniel Stewart's College, a relatively middle-class establishment to be sure. I got just a tiny touch of Heimatgefühle when I stumbled on that... Is the literary citation a first, I wonder, for 'Dirty Daniels'?