Vote Dalek or he'll kill us all. Especially you.

So, things I have learned since Thursday:

1. Scotland, and some parts of it in particular, is very, very pretty;

2. Food is good;

3. Shouting melodramatic death threats at people you don't know is very therapeutic;

4. No, really, food is good;

5. Don't, if you can help it, live 524 miles from your best friend;

6. But visit anyway, it's good for your mental health.

I hadn't, until a couple of days ago, been to Scotland since 1993. This despite the fact my parents lived in Falkirk until a couple of weeks before I was born, and, er, my name is Iona. (It's not the same as not having been to Scotland at all, though; I remember being six and very very happy that there is an extinct volcano in the middle of Edinburgh.) But, as hathy_col has been in St Andrews for three years, the fact I hadn't been there yet seemed to be getting somewhere in the region of epic fail.

And so! And so, I got up at ridiculous o'clock in the morning, saw the sunrise off the first train of the day, made it to Liverpool and to then to Wigan and then fell asleep somewhere near Preston. Several hours later, I woke up to find we'd crossed the border - the landscape had become chilly and coniferous - and I was in Lockerbie, of all places. I had lots of train-kerfuffling in Edinburgh, missed my connection by about thirty seconds and ended up en route to Aberdeen on the slowest train in the world. It was very picturesque, just... slow. After several decades, I tumbled off the train at Leuchars and was met by hathy_col and Starbug. As usual, one of them looked much more healthy than the other.

Once we'd got over the obligatory squee and recrimination ("It's so great to see you! Why do you live in the middle of fucking nowhere?" / "Excuse me, I prefer arse-end of nowhere...") we piled into Starbug and did what she calls the bog-standard tour of St Andrews, which I had no objection to, because, well, pretty. She wasn't lying when she said it had only three streets, but they're all grey stone and cobbled and full of flowers and there are flashes, reflected in windows and between roofs and at the end of alleys, of the sea. And this I approve of mightily. Even through the rain, it was lovely. We eventually wound up having lunch, which wasn't exactly lunch, but more like dessert, um. Pancakes with chocolate sauce for lunch never hurt anyone, naturally, and Colleen had decided that she was going to Feed Me Up, because I suck and haven't been eating very much for about two weeks now. (It's getting a little silly: I'm feeling the cold much more than I ought to, for someone who grew up in the north, and I no longer have any jeans that fit. They all seem to slide over my hips. It's comical and somewhat obscene.) And, unlike the last four or five people who have made this resolution, Colleen actually succeeded pretty well at it, through the twin endowments of a) knowing me very well indeed and b) sheer indomitability.

Pancakes with chocolate sauce. Yes. Mmmm. And then we wandered through the town as it was brightening up, and I made excited noises about crocuses and daffodils and the ruins and the way the sun lit up the stones, and occasionally made marvelling noises about the number of Americans - so many Americans! I mean, in our brief walk around the town, I must have heard about a dozen American accents - and Colleen said something truly, truly unrepeatable about me, Scotland and the verb "to pillage", and we ended up laughing hysterically and scaring natives and tourists alike down through the ruins and in the direction of the water.

Eventually, we got ice-cream and sat, contentedly, peacefully, on a bench, occasionally cackling like madwomen ("Don't throw raspberry sorbet at the indigenous Scots!" / "Sorry.") and watching the seagulls whirl and call over the sea. It was idyllic. And very cold. But mostly idyllic.

Stage two of Feeding Me Up began shortly afterwards, when stupidore, who is one of Colleen's housemates and the owner of a three-foot-tall red inflatable Dalek named Fred, appeared with the really-rather-marvellous plan of pink wine, Chinese food and Torchwood. I was totally and utterly knackered by this point, so I curled up on a sofa and said various truly ridiculous things - I seem to remember at some point claiming that straight people don't exist, except for straight people, who don't count - and then somehow or other we were watching a Channel 4 documentary on teenage mothers filmed in Liverpool Women's, which led to a lot of me going "ooh, ooh, I know that corridor, ooh, I know that bench." My father did not appear, thank god.

Colleen woke me up before class the next morning in her time-honoured fashion of wafting coffee under my nose. The first thing I said was "urrrrrgh"; the second thing was: "The hamster's in the kitchen!" (At three fifteen am, I had an altercation with the hamster. Sometimes I worry myself.) She left me a piece of paper with exciting instructions - "Building by the fishmonger's! It has a portcullis!" - and I met her for lunch. We did that thing that you do when you grew up in a seaside town (why, why do we always end up eating scampi? I mean, I like scampi, but I think we fed it to tau_sigma as well and it's just getting a bit ridiculous) and proceeded to go down to the Union, set up camp with aforementioned three-foot red inflatable Dalek, a tinfoil K-9, a host of posters saying "Please vote for the Dalek - otherwise he'll kill me!" and a fairly robust collective sense of humour.

It is amazing, how much fun it is to shout death threats at people you don't know who are going to vote in an election for a student union you're not a member of. From what I understand, the Dalek was standing as the comedy candidate for president of the St. Andrews Union, and did, indeed, have a set of interesting policies. Equal rights and anti-discrimination - after all, he wants to kill everyone - as well as disability rights and accessibility reforms (ramps into every building, naturally). In practice, we shanghaied every single person who went past, handed out a flyer and yelled, "Vote Dalek or he'll kill us all!", with brief breaks for lunch, being interviewed for the radio and shielding the candidate from interlocutors with safety pins. After three hours of this, Colleen, Katie and I were getting pretty good at it, which introduced a new worry. We'd been shouting "Vote Dalek and you'll be the last to be irradiated!" at people with gay abandon, and rather a lot of them had been grinning back and shouting, "We did!"

I finally gave voice to the thought mid-afternoon. "Colleen... what if we win?"

...yeah. Colleen did express some regret that I'd gone all the way up there and she'd got me campaigning for an inflatable candidate, but, well. I like campaigning. I'm good at it. I like Daleks. I like Colleen, I like shouting at random people, I like ice-cream and sunshine. I can't imagine a better way to spend an afternoon. She claims it's the most surreal thirty-six hours ever, but this discussion did sort of segue into Things Colleen and Iona Have Done Over The Years That Might Strike The Outside Observer As A Bit Peculiar, a grand litany featuring a lot of Dalek-chasing, jelly babies, singing, a life-size cardboard cut-out of Miranda Otto and the memorable occasion on which I was in a wheelchair being yelled at by Brian Blessed, and Colleen asked R2D2 if he was in Star Wars. (I wonder, vaguely, if our living hundreds of miles apart is the universe's way of maintaining its structural integrity.) Also, she once put white wine in the iron of the son of the president of Nigeria, but I was emphatically not involved in that one.

In the end, I had to make my morose way back south, but not before the Feeding Iona Up plan culminated in the culinary monstrosity that is the deep-fried Mars bar. It was the most awful thing I've ever tasted. Also, I ate it. Pretty much all of it. Oh dear, oh dear. The journey home was long and horrible and took about seven hours. It was a lovely couple of days, and Colleen informs me that Dalek Fred did not win, but did come third, beating two actual human candidates on his platform of CRUSHING ALL INFERIOR BEINGS. Life is occasionally great.