Edinburgh:
Royal Mile

This is the road - straight as an arrow - between the castle at the top and Holyrood Palace at the bottom. The upper half is beautiful and fascinating, the woollen mill (really, they actually weave things there, in a tradition going back, oooh, several years now), the museum of childhood where you can see archive films of singing street games, the mainland outlet for Judith Glue's team of knitters in the Orkneys...

If you continue down towards the bottom end, you have an apparently endless selection of quaint little shops where representatives from the entire Commonwealth sell memorabilia like Scottish flags, thistle tea-towels, tartan shopping bags, postcards of every conceivable kind, and where pride of place is given to quantity and price, at the expense of quality and taste.

This is John Knox's house; it's about one-third of the way down, so you can work out for yourself what it's like. Why anyone in an enlightened age like ours should want to celebrate a legacy of religious oppression, I can't imagine. But it's a solid, moral-sounding name, and maybe the Japanese tourists don't ask too many questions about what people are famous for.