As I usually do when I visit my home town, I drop by the Culloden battlefield and walk the lines.

Back in 1746 armies marched around until they found a flat bit of ground and then had a battle.

The Government forces were equipped with artillery that day and disciplined ranks of infantry; the Jacobites’ main weapon was a suicidal manoeuvre called the Highland charge, a massed sprint at the enemy by a wide line of men armed more with claymores than muskets. The outcome was predictable.

As a good Inverness boy, my allegiance was always to Bonnie Prince Charlie for no reason other than the bestialities meted out to Highland men like me by Butcher Cumberland after the battle.

Thankfully warfare has changed and the British Army staff colleges I have attended preach the manoeuvrist rather than the attritional doctrine.

Or has it changed? As I write, Ukraine’s forces are facing a new enemy of 10,000 North Korean troops, drafted in to theatre to bolster the flagging Russian Army.

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Moscow now appreciates that this is an attritional conflict after all, with its massed casualties risking Putin’s defeat on the home front as well as the front line.

The reinforcements, introduced under a deal between the Russian President and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, are inexperienced, malnourished, ill-equipped and poorly-led and face almost certain annihilation from the battle-hardened Ukrainians.

A huge number of the combatants in this ongoing conflict are conscripts, with those from the east unlikely to have any desire to fight, up against those from the west who have plenty because they want to save their country.

I think the result is as inevitable as it was at Culloden.

Somewhere in the cavernous cellars here at Schloss Edwards, high above the Helensburgh hinterland, among the dusty wine racks and maturing cheeses, there is a box containing my diaries.

And I don’t mean the Alan Clarke or Winston Churchill type, into which were noted momentous historical events, more the black A4 ones you get from WH Smith, within which I scribe mundane things like dental appointments (actually they’ll be in the 2026 diary) and Rhu Amateurs’ home fixtures.

I am a slave to my routine. The term ‘set in his ways’ could have been invented for me.

Actually I find they are quite handy for things like storing all my passwords for my myriad apps and email accounts should the world come to a shuddering stop if I lost my phone.

(Image: Mike Edwards) Of all the diaries I have had, the current one bears the least collateral damage.

It is almost pristine. This I blame on the ever present mobile phone and any number of laptops I have scattered around the castle’s chambers, which have my calendar electronically embossed.

Sometimes I have felt so guilty, and this is a big fess, I have retrospectively made diary entries from the computer into the book.

This might be because I don’t want it to feel left out or something. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I have used a fountain pen or a quill to do so.

Given all the advances in technology I am slowly coming to terms with, and possessing a plethora of devices with the world on them, did I buy my paper diary for 2025? Of course I did!