When I said I would be taking the High Road again...

I hadn't imagined I would be literally doing so.

Being prone to doing things at the last minute (and not being paid till the last Thursday in the month, bizarrely), I rang up the Procurator Fiscal's office in D------- to find out if the trial was still in the list for this week and was I still required. They confirmed I was, so I asked how I went about claiming my travel back. A very shocked young woman informed me that oh no, I don't pay for my own ticket - they buy it and send me the rail ticket in the post.

I said oh, oh, right. So you sort it all out for me then?

Oh, said she. Ah. Well, you'd need to ring back tomorrow anyway cos the girl that does the travel warrants isn't working today, but it's ok because you'll be coming up Tuesday anyway...

No, I say, I figured if I am coming all that way I may as well spend some time with my family, and as Monday is a Bank Holiday and I need to take a day either side of the trial for travel, I may as well come up on Saturday or Sunday.

Oh, says she. Well, you'll need to fly then.

Fly? You'll pay for me to fly up?!

Och yes!

So I rang back the next day and spoke to Laura, who booked me on to a flight from my local airport up to Inversneckie. My brother commented that after I'd flown up the once I'd never want to get the train again. Let me put it to you like so - £96.20 for 6 and a half hours bored witless on a train (7 and a half to 8 if you have to change anywhere, and quite often there are rail replacement buses due to engineering works) or £99.60 if you book far enough in advance for 1 hour 25 in the air and a half hour drive to the airport from home? OK, so you have to be at the airport no later than half an hour before the flight leaves, but you literally arrive in Inversneckie, get into the terminal, the bags appear and off you go and it takes five minutes. Had we not gone to the supermarket on the way home, I would have been back indoors less than four hours after leaving our house in West Yorkshire. You can't whack it, you really can't. Specially as the train journey comes after an hour in the car to York from home, or two trains and again about an hour, hour and a quarter, if no lift is available.

So, I flew up. On an aeroplane the size of a postage stamp. A 29 seater Jetstream 41, courtesy of Eastern Airways.

I have rarely been so scared in all my puff, especially when we hit some pretty bad turbulence. I thought I might need to use the sickbag, but gladly had no need to recourse to it. It was nearly as bad as my brother's driving at over 100 mph over a set of bumps in the road near here. When your head is rebounding off the roof of the aeroplane/car, you know it's bumpy out there.

But I'm here!