AGATHA CHRISTIE WEEK...

Hallo, folks. Dan here, with a brief update for you lovely people out there in warmer places. We are currently sitting in The Orkney Library in, er, Orkney. It is Agatha Christie week here, and the staff are all wearing highly amusing wigs and cardigans and skirts and sporting the obligatory detective magnifying glass (tm) - so there are pleny of Miss Marples and Hercule Poirots walking around me as I type.

It is cold here. Rachel has a cold. Dan has a cold. Esther has a hole in her leg and hobbles, from when she fell over in the street. Other than that, Orkney is fab! So fab, in fact, that we have decided to extend our stay here. We are staying in a hostel on an organic farm, with three tiny kittens (Esther is in heaven!).

Since leaving London, we have seen: Edinburgh, which was great; Kingussie, which was great, also; John O'Groats, which was, in the accurate words of Lonely Planet, an 'overdressed car park' (although there were a number of celebrities in town filming something for channel 5 - Brian Blessed, the bloke from Top Gear who isn't Jeremy Clarkson, and many other fabulously famous people whom I recognised but couldn't name).

On our way to the ferry to Orkney, we (I) decided that it would be a wonderful thing to do to drive into a ditch and get stuck. And so I did. Luckily, some people stopped and helped us out, otherwise we'd probably be there still.

However, we made it over to Orkney, and looked at lots of really old things, like The Ring of Brodgar, Scara Brae, the excellent Maes Howe... It has all been too splendid.

Anyway, I promised that this would be brief, so I will let you, dear reader, get back to whatever vitally important task you were in the middle of doing when you took a break to read this. Fare thee well.

Next stop, Skye...