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The big day arrived and the sun shone down upon us. The first ever meeting of Pbase's Scottish Posse took place in the historic city of Perth, once known as St John's Town of Perth, but now given the slightly less divine but more tourist friendly epithets: 'The True Heart of Scotland', or 'The Gateway to the Highlands' or 'The Fair City'. Take your pick. Our meeting place was the Caithness Glass Visitor Centre, which is located in an industrial estate across the dual carriageway from the football stadium. It was actually nicer than it sounds - not your typical industrial estate it must be said. It was nice to finally put some faces to the names, and to meet some of the faces in person. After a short while waiting for stragglers and drinking some coffee, we headed off en masse towards Huntingtontower Castle - which is a mere stone's throw away. The woman who took our entrance fees very kindly agreed to get into costume for us as she told us the story of the Green Lady, a former resident who threw herself from one of the towers, and whose spirit lives on sitting at this window waiting for her love to return. After a pleasant couple of hours examining every nook and cranny of the castle, we decided that our second port of call ought to be Scone Palace (pronounced Scoone), a very stately pile dating back to the 14th century that is built on the site of an earlier royal palace that was home to the kings and queens of Scots. Before then, however, Gavin, Andy (aka Northstar), his son, Conor and myself made a short detour to Methven to capture a few images of the recently restored Methven Castle. After an hour or so, we headed back to Scone, and met up with the others in the Palace's coffee shop, where I was being blamed by a certain fan of frothy coffee for their coffee frothing machine not working. A very pleasant and warm afternoon was spent wandering around the grounds looking at ancient graves, flowers, bridges, peacocks and highland cows before we finally went our separate ways at about 5pm. All in all a very enjoyable day out that not even Celtic being beaten 3-1 by Hibs could spoil.

Some dodgy geezers | Castles that we saw | Animals we ran away from | Flowers we didn't pick

This time last year I was contemplating things too