Chuff chuff and chocks away, it’s time for a posho safari. We’re hunting big game on this old-fashioned round-up, so I’ll be lugging my giant net and my blunderbuss to bars across Edinburgh’s New Town. As is customary on all posho safaris, each bar will be rated by how many wealthy patrons I collect (or ‘kidnap’, if you want to spoil this premise with semantics) in 35 minutes or less. Nouveau riche, trust-fund teen or coined-up codger: as long as they fit in the back of my van, they’re fair game. Right, on with the hunt.   

With said blunderbuss and equally said net in hand (and an electrified dog collar attached to my belt should these poshos get shirty), I entered The Wally Dug, a basement bar which my editor reassured me was where ‘that Saltburn lot’ hang out. The clientele were rugger lads and rah-rah girls for whom a stay in a manor house was a matter of course. Indeed, it’s possible to enjoy a pint in one of the side rooms here, provided you can ignore the chaos and clamour of coins-in-mouth accents and excitable yoofs. Planting a Le Creuset canvas bag on the barroom floor proved effective enough to lure a gaggle of the youthful wealtherati into my traps. Weightage of poshos caught: a Durham-ton. 

Next, The Cumberland Bar, a veritable haven next to my wild night at Wally’s Saltburn cellar. It was a quiet evening at the bar, but the impeccable staff, cute-as-a-button pooches padding around, and sedate nooks in this brown-panelled den made it, literally, rich pickings when you’re out on a scavenge. Weightage of poshos caught: a Downton-kilo. 

The final stop on my posho safari was The Magnum, an upmarket restaurant and bar with an ambience both polite and formal. There were a few old money types in there, the kind who probably imbibe food through an orifice that only the privately educated are told about, and yet the staff and stonking drinks list made this Dundee scum feel eminently welcome. Perhaps I’ll return some day to finagle my way into one of these loaded men’s wills while enjoying the impressive wine list this calm environ has to offer. Until then, it’s in the net with them. Weightage of poshos caught: five Joanna Hogg-halves.