It was a double of the cheapest stuff. Rough on his throat. He coughed through it, sank down onto the bar stool.

The advantage of the Albannach now was that none of his colleagues would go there. This bar, practically pressed up against the office, would have been filled to bursting with reporters just off the beat (and on it) in the old days. Moustaches, shabby suits; later leather jackets, well-worn jeans just like his. All gone. The kids from the online team zoomed further into town, to Wi-Fi hotspots with craft beers, he assumed. The mobile reception in here wasn’t good enough for Twitter; there was no jukebox. In his youth he’d hated this place, called it out to other members of his own young guard as emblematic of everything that was wrong with journalism. The macho culture. The refusal to embrace new ideas. The cronyism.

Well, all those cronies had been edged or insulted out by the new regime, the pay cuts, the rounds of voluntary redundancies and the Internet, and now here he was, the old man at the end of the world. He took another sip, nodded at the white-hard auld jake at the other end of the bar and felt all fifty-two years of his age sink through him.

He’d brought Clio in here once. She’d helped herself to one of his cigarettes while he was at the bar.

‘Sorry, doll. I’ve been on rollies for so long that this just looked too good.’

Her accent had changed again, he noticed, a bit more of a lilt and whisper in it than before. That day, she’d wanted to talk to him about land reform. She’d been living up north, working on community buy-out projects, and she wanted him to write a feature.

‘I’m going back up in a week and I think you should come with me. We’re staying in bothies, because the absentee landlord is letting the tenancies go to ruin, foul feudal bastard he is. But the community there, darlin. You need to feel it. It’s proper. I’m in different folks’ houses every night for dinner – they’re just so happy we’re there and helping them. The bothy’s basic, but people give you a few logs for the fire, or an extra blanket, you know. Come with me. You could write the article that could become, like, the call to arms for the land reform movement, you know? You’d be the voice – the first person to voice what’s really going on to the self-satisfied Central Belt. You could become the expert; you could even write a book! Tell you, sometimes, Neil, sometimes I think I might settle up there. Permanently. There’s this initiative to encourage people to take up crofting. Tax relief. Keep a couple of pigs, grow vegetables. Does that appeal to you at all, ever? Be a good place to get on with your writing …’