I forgot to mention what I did last Friday: a trip to SPICe, the Scottish Parliament Information Centre – the Parliament’s library, although it has very little in the way of physical collections, focussing very modernly on electronic sources. It also provides research briefings for MSPs and their staff. It’s an interesting organisation: it can’t be that often that a new library is started completely from scratch, but this was their task for the formation of the Parliament in 1999.

As well as a trip to the SPICe office and the Donald Dewar Room, which contains books from his collection, we had a tour of the building. I’d been once before but had time on Friday to see a greater amount and learn more about the building. We also crossed paths with former Scottish Tory leader David McLetchie who was showing a few people the chamber at the same time as we passed through.