Bad Good Food Guide

I don't tend to buy a newspaper, simply because I never have time to read it - flights and train journeys only generally. Being tied to a laptop means that more uptodate sources of everything are at hand anyway. But while visiting away from the guest house I came across the Sunday Times Scotland, or should that be Sunday Times 'Scotland', under this bold heading was a self-advert for "The top 130 places to Dine for less than £50" - 'great' I thought -'bound to be lots of Edinburgh area entries out of 130, what with the 18 Michelin stars in town (I've heard), the next tier down is bound to be brimming with gems and how will it compare with our own preferences'.

I was a little taken aback (though in all honesty barely surprised) to find that nearly all of the Sunday Times 'Scotland' top 130 weren't in Scotland at all. Pages and pages for London, a page for each English region, a page for Wales and then finally a page for something called 'Scotland and N. Ireland' - don't look for bargains outside of Belfast when in Northern Ireland as that is where both NI's entries were located - thus leaving 10% of the UK population represented by barely half that percentage of entries and this remember under the banner 'Sunday Times Scotland'. In some industries this would be called false advertising.

And what of Edinburgh with such a strong reputation for culinary delights - one of Europe's 'foody cities'. Scotland's capital only matched Belfast with two entries and that's if you consider Leith to have lost its separate identity...