Graham Carter - the voice of age and experience

It’s not every day that you come in for criticism in the Scottish Parliament, but it happened to me, last Tuesday.

It was the last day of a short holiday in Edinburgh, and as tours of the building were advertised as free, and because we rarely say no to freebies, my wife and I decided to drop in and have a nose around.

Unfortunately, what we hadn’t banked on was the Parliament being in session, so the bad news was they weren’t doing any tours that day, after all.

However, the good news was we were offered the chance to sit in on a debate and watch it from the public gallery.

It had already begun when we arrived, so after being reminded to turn off our mobile phones and sit in total silence, we were ushered into the gallery, where there were plenty of empty seats, including in the front row of the balcony, overlooking the chamber.

So we sat down there, only to be immediately confronted by a security man, who pointed at the sign on the seat next to me, saying ‘Reserved’.

I was somehow supposed to realise that this applied to the whole row, not just one seat, and he mumbled something about it being “obvious”, before leading us to some other seats.

Now, apart from being plain wrong - the sign wasn’t obvious, but ambiguous, which is the opposite of obvious - calling something “obvious” implied we were a bit dumb to get it wrong, and in my book that is more than a little rude.

And it was doubly rude because, in this case, the people being accused of being dumb had absolutely no opportunity to defend or explain themselves.

To so much as squeak in the public gallery would have instantly put you in a competition between a policeman and the rest of the security staff to be the first to drag you out.

While an angry row started to kick off between the Scottish Nationalists and the Conservatives in the chamber below, I thought how ironic it was that of all places for me to get drawn into an argument, the one place where I had no right to speak up for myself was inside a parliamentary chamber.

A local connection even passed through my mind since the Swindon-born suffragette, Edith New, was the first campaigner to go on hunger strike in Scotland, and therefore did as much as anybody in Scottish history to further the cause of their democracy, and if it had been up to me, I would have named the building after her.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only argument we nearly got into in Edinburgh.

We were in a pub on the Royal Mile when we had the misfortune to encounter a man who said he came from Yorkshire but now lives in Bristol, and who - when the subject of Swindon came up - was pleased to loudly use a word likening it to a toilet.

Once again I was ready to speak out, but again thought better of it, because the offending lout followed up his damning judgement on our fair town by saying he had never actually been here.

If there is one thing I’ve learnt it’s that there is no point in arguing with people blessed with the magical power of knowledge without evidence, so I bit my tongue again.

Now I don’t want you to go away with the idea that a trip to Edinburgh is all about arguments.

Far from it.

It is one of the friendliest, most laid-back, happiest and coolest cities on the entire planet. Arguably.