I flew into Aberdeen on a rainy morning, when it looked hopelessly gray, and was depressed because I assumed that that was typical of Scotland. On the next morning I flew to the Shetland Islands, where I officially began my tour with a pint for which I wasn't carded; in the following weeks I visited Orkney, Inverness, Skye, Edinburgh, Stirling, Dunblane, York, London, Canterbury, Glasgow, Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Elgin, North Berwick and Aberdeen.
Birds: The cliffs of Shetland host over 200,000 seabirds during the summer; the most common are puffins, gannets, guillemots, fulmars and gulls. Gannets are particularly impressive; the colonies they nest in are the noisiest, smelliest, most maniacally invigorating places on earth. They crowd so much that they need an elaborate signalling system to avoid accidents and keep track of their mates. (Before taking off, for instance, they point their beaks upwards and cackle for 10 seconds.) Nesting birds can be scary: I once happened on a shingle beach where Arctic terns were nesting, and suddenly there were several hundred terns in the air screeching and swooping at me.
Gulls are the national birds of Scotland (in practice). There are two common species on the mainland, the herring gull and the great black-backed gull, and one or both can be found scavenging or snatching food from people in all the major cities. Both species have a blood-red spot on the lower mandible of the beak, which makes them look even more threatening than they actually are. In Inverness they bicker in the city squares and fly very low above the ground with absolutely no regard for human life.
Hostels: There are two types of hostels, SYHA "youth" hostels and "independent" hostels. My experience is that SYHA hostels have better facilities but are not always ideally located. On the whole, facilities are less important than roommates. I found that most of the people at hostels were tourists, except at Aberdeen where they were mostly offshore oil workers. The great thing about hostels is that you get to talk to all sorts of people, though relatively few of them are youthful. Also, since everyone is travelling through Scotland, paths cross and recross all the time-this happened to me twice. The catch is that you are exposed to people with alternative sleeping habits, but this is rarer than you might expect.
Food, Drink, Architecture: I like Scottish food. The ubiquitous haddock and chips can get very good indeed (though I have my reservations about malt vinegar on fries), and so can vegetable soup, broth and meat-pies. I don't mind haggis, but one exposes oneself as a tourist by ordering it. As for drink, two pub chains are of note: Beer and food are significantly cheaper at Wetherspoon pubs, and the Eerie Pub Co. has bars in disused castles, churches, etc.
Not all of Scotland's myriad cathedrals are fully licensed, but most are worth a visit anyway. Prehistoric structures are common, too, many of them preserved amazingly well, like the 5,000-year-old Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney. The neoclassical granite work of Aberdeen is impressive and almost attractive, and Glasgow houses the architectural masterworks of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who seems to have liked his silverware and his chair-backs twice the normal length.
The Edinburgh Festival: The population of Edinburgh more than doubles each August for the Edinburgh Festival. The main event is the so-called Fringe, with over 150 venues hosting several performances every day, as well as street performances by fire-eating unicyclists, etc. The Fringe is open to all performers, so the quality of shows is variable, and the participant/spectator ratio is so high that shows rarely sell out. The Royal Mile is packed throughout August, but I found it quieter and less enthusiastic towards the end.
The other big event is the International Festival, which features established talent. There are also book, jazz and film festivals, and special exhibitions at the galleries. One of the quirkier events at this year's International Festival was the Synge Cycle, a nine-hour performance of the collected plays of J.M. Synge, which I attended, very embarrassingly, in a T-shirt that had been packed adjacent to a stick of butter.
Summer was already drawing to a close in much of Scotland when I left. The puffins' departure in mid-August is the beginning of the end, and by September conditions in the Highlands have normally begun to deteriorate. On the morning that I left, all flights to Wick and Shetland were cancelled owing to adverse weather. Most hotels and tourist facilities are closed from October to March. Winter temperatures are not particularly severe, but gales are frequent and the days shrink to a few hours around noon. It's a "desolate wee place" then, as someone said at the airport, though I rather like the sound of that.