As I’ve probably said before in these hallowed pages, I’m always delighted and intrigued by “small world” stories.

Just yesterday (Friday) lunchtime while braving the Christmas shopping hoardes, I bumped into a friend. He told me that a mutual friend of ours had recently and unexpectedly bumped into one of her former flatmates in – of all places – Antarctica.

As you do.

Then last night I was out with Donald in Blackfriar’s, a great little pub in the city centre, where a good friend had introduced us to what turned out to be none other than two people we know through Flickr (see photo above). The only Flickrists I know in real life are people I know anyway, and so these guys were the first Flickr contacts I’d met “in the wild”, so to speak.

We had a lovely chat about all sorts of things, not least the now legendary “Guess Where” thread in Flickr’s Scotland group.

Later on, in a telling picture of national character, Donald, myself and other friends found ourselves next to a table full of lively, friendly, and somewhat less than lucid personalities.

Their advanced states of stociousness were best illustrated by the fact that it took us some considerable effort and painstaking conversation to establish that they were in fact Scottish.

One of the key pillars of our protracted negotiations revolved around a ten pound note that one of our group found on the floor in the “no man’s land” between our tables. My friend insisted quite rightly that it had been lost by our excitable and haphazard neighbours. Our new friends (as far as our over-stretched powers of interpretation could ascertain) asserted to the contrary in a manner that would have made Mrs Doyle appear something of a selfish scrooge.

Eventually, and somehow, an impasse was reached whereby the said bank note lay between our two groups for some considerable time, untouched and unclaimed.

In the end, one of our neighbouring group picked it up, and we were relieved that they’d finally been decisive and correct in claiming ownership – only to be rewarded by the kind gentleman with a round of drinks for our group.

Which was nice.