Nobody mentions it much, but the only tartan you will see is worn by students and old lags playing the pipes to make some cash from tourists. It is not national dress, apart from at weddings when people reckon they stand a better chance of pulling in a kilt, and in hotels with tacky tartan cladding on the walls, and at Hogmanay because it is a chance to dress up and try to pull again if you didn't score at the wedding. Though why women would fancy anyone in a dress is beyond me. Then again... The other thing the glossy tourist brochures, showing misty glens and stags standing proudly on the hillside, do not tell you is that many of the people making the most of the tourist business are White Settlers - the English incomers who have decided to escape from the city and live a simple life running restaurants and guesthouses in the maverick Highland air. You can spot them: they will be wearing tartan. You can also escape them: by going to Aberdeen in the north-east, a grim, glowering, God forsaken granite city where the wind whips in off the North Sea, which is comparatively warmer than the people.