The busman's holiday

I will never again criticise Lothian Buses. Not even on a cold, wet, grey Tuesday morning when the number 27 storms past my stop, full to the back seat with pupils from Heriot’s.
Not even on a Monday holiday, when the only people on leave are council staff, yet the Edinburgh bus service is reduced to one an hour on each route.
But at least the 27 does eventually come, unlike the number 305 yesterday to Radeburg. Okay it was a public holiday, but both the campsite owner and the bus timetable promised that there would be a bus to Radeburg at 9.25 “precisely”. From there we could catch a train to Dresden.
We waited, and waited and waited. It was sunny, so the waiting was considerably more pleasant than an Edinburgh morning in November.
But by 9.48 we had decided that the driver of the 305 had thrown a public holiday sickie. Do we wait another hour for the next scheduled bus, or walk the eight kilometres – five miles – to the station?
“Let’s walk,” I said. “It will be good for us.” You need to know that the only exercise my husband I get is walking to the bus stop and back, all of two hundred yards. That, and the occasional, desultory meander around the supermarket when we need to replenish the wine rack.
But walk we did, and several blisters and only two foul-mouthed rants later we reached the train station and our carriage into Dresden.
We were so exhausted by our forced march (okay, okay, it was only five miles), that we dragged ourselves around Dresden without much enthusiasm. But even in our exhausted state we couldn’t fail to be impressed by the determined restoration work that has brought this ancient city centre back to life after it was almost destroyed in 1945.
The city’s landmark building, the Frauenkirche, Church of Our Lady, was raised to the ground by Allied bombers, but it has been painstakingly rebuild since German reunification.
The over-sweet interior resembles a Battenberg cake – far more baroque than any Scottish Presbyterian church and looked, to me, too new, fake even.
Coventry took a different approach. Its cathedral was also destroyed in the war, but the city fathers built a defiantly modern replacement next to the ruin of the original.
It made me wonder. If Edinburgh Castle – that most symbolic of Scottish buildings - was destroyed in some awful disaster, should it be rebuilt, stone by stone, so that an exact replica stands where the original once did, or should a new edifice emerge from the rubble?
Answers on a postcard please.
It was also Nigel’s birthday yesterday. We celebrated with Kir Royales and fresh asparagus. He says he has forgotten what age he is and I believe him.