Out for a stroll round the city centre today, heard bagpipe music – live this time, not the awful canned stereotypical ‘Scottish’ music those dreadful ‘tartan tat’ shops (which keep multiplying) insist on playing on speakers outside their windows of dire tourist rubbish (they are the bane of Edinburgh dweller’s lives, we loath them). Walked over the apalling mess the tram works have made of Princes Street and down into the Gardens to find pipe band playing in the Ross Bandstand, then when other performers came on they moved over towards the fountain end of the Gardens and started playing again, to the delight of the tourists (and me, of course I had the camera with me, so snappy snappy, shame the light was so poor, very overcast, dark day). But there you go, highland dress, bagpipes and Edinburgh Castle, can you get much more shortbread tin image of Scotland than that?

The pipers were joined by some Scottish country dancers – the younger girl (in the tartan skirt) had the biggest smile through it all.

Piping away!

This one isn’t as sharp as I hoped for but I took several trying to be clever and frame this young piper girl between the pipes of her colleague with his back to me, but as he bobbed around in time to the music it meant he was moving all the time and it was click, nope, click, nope, never quite in frame, finally got one – not too sharp but close enough, it’ll do!