A brewery and a Scots Guardsman

Visiting the Belhaven Brewery was another suggestion from Dogberry on pink fish media following on from our virtual meeting outside a pub in Elie. There may be a thread running through his contributions to the walk – I couldn’t possibly comment.

A curious thing – at precisely the moment Lego Marchbanks was attempting to drink Belhaven dry I was pausing in the middle of my day’s walk in order to watch a Scots Guardsman cross my route in Warwickshire.

Meeting a Scots Guardsman when I was (virtually) not too far from Coldstream was one thing, but it turns out that it was the locomotive in the film Night Mail (1936). You know, ‘crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order’. (I wonder if anyone will ever write a poem about logging on to make a payment by Paypal?) And as I’m near the border, a double minor coincidence.

As the footpath crosses the railway at line level here, I had every right to get as close as was safe. I watched Scots Guardsman thunder by at a distance of about three metres. Any closer and I felt I might have risked freaking the driver out, which I definitely didn’t want to do. The sound, sight and smell were all fantastic.

Brewery photo © Simon Johnston (cc-by-sa/2.0)