“It’ll Still Be There Tomorrow, Keddie!!!”

Three exclamation marks, in a memoir written more than sixty years later. After that, he writes, “Sounds only hereafter had to suffice!”

He got the sound. I have never even got that.

The castle has fired a gun at one o’clock since 1861, when the businessman John Hewat brought the idea from Paris so that ships in the Firth of Forth could set their clocks. It goes off every day except Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day, and Historic Environment Scotland notes that it often surprises people on Princes Street below. It surprised me on Princes Street in 2015. In 2019 it went off while I was in a chip queue on the Royal Mile, explaining to our eldest that it would be any minute now.

So on a Saturday this October we went properly. First, because I could not help myself, I walked the family the long way round to look at Heriot’s. Andrew Thornton, class of 2012, remembers on the school’s alumni blog that pupils felt like celebrities, with tourists regularly photographing the building or attempting an impromptu “Hogwarts” tour. I took eleven photographs through the railings and asked my husband which window was biology.

We were on the Argyle Battery by 12.35, which is early even by my standards. I had the phone on video. I had briefed the children. At 12.59 the youngest needed the toilet, our daughter Bea dropped her ice cream on my shoe, and I looked down.

The crowd went “Oh!” I have twenty-two seconds of my own trainer.

On the way back down my husband, who had seen the whole thing, put an arm round me and said that it would still be there tomorrow. It would. It just wouldn’t go off. Tomorrow was Sunday.