The sun is shining. Scotland, the tart, is putting on a show for the visitors, tossing her golden barley tresses that ripple in the wind like something sung by Sting, and lifting the skirts of her clouds, showing off her lush green landscape, soft with ferns and moss tantalising you with notions of warm, balmy days that are still light long into the evening. Just when you've made up your mind that it's a wash-out, you wake up to beauty and are seduced into thinking that you might, possibly, maybe could just buy yourself a little pistachio coloured cottage beside the broad smile of beach in Elie, get a dog and a loom, or a kiln, and start wearing an anorak. Forget the kilt. The Scottish national costume is the Anorak. On a nice day, you celebrate by wearing it unzipped, and to really express delight at the weather, you whip it off to sit on.
We're on the beach - a swathe of sand as broad as my accent at the mouth of the Tay, fringed with dunes and fragrant pine forests that moan gently in the breeze, with the occasional sharp crack, like an ice cube dropped into a glass of water, that makes you hold your breath and wait for a tree to come crashing down. The sun will make an appearance in the afternoon, but for now it's boiling, bruised skies with the occasional glint of blue. We're in a nature reserve called Tentsmuir where Luke is squinting through binoculars at the seals playing in the ocean who, less flirtatious than the countryside, refuse to come out on to the sandbar and bask. There's a wind, persistent as a toddler in a sweetshop blowing off the sea which occasionally gusts, tugging at your legs and the hem of your clothes but still leaves you standing upright, anorak flapping like a superhero's cape behind you, or wrapping itself around you like a lover depending on whether you're walking up the beach or down. The few families who have braved the sands have sensibly come with windbreaks and small half-moon tents in which the adults shelter while the kids romp around heedless and possibly heel-less since the sea would freeze your feet off. It's absolutely stunning - Scotland with the safety catch turned off. If it wasn't for its disobligingly damp and dismal climate this beach would be ringed with hotels instead of spindly trees and carpeted with litter instead of pine cones and white shells.
There's nothing but the tread of our trainers and the occasional tripod of gull footprints, and then the wind starts to wail like a cartoon ghost sending my hair, crazed, across my face and the sand dancing ahead of us up the deserted beach and the distant cow lick of the surf.
It's deafening.
But even if you spoke the words would be torn out of your mouth and filled with sand.
So I just shut up.
For once.
