Edinburgh: A flaring path in torchlight glow

The bagpipe must have been invented on a cold, dark night. Its first sound, a long-drawn pitch of melodic invitation conceived out of silence, clenched my eyelids and had me secluded in blankness. The courtyard was exposed, high up one of the tallest hills in Edinburgh, so the lone bagpipe sang most clamourously only over the howler of the wind – and over perhaps the creaking of my bones, buckling under the December chill of Edinburgh Castle.