A Tour By Any Other Name...

If only you could see what goes on in the Mercat office when we’re trying to think of a new name for a tour!  Thesauruses at the ready, we shout out every possible variation on the words ‘ghost’, ‘haunted’, ‘underground’ (there are plenty to be had) and then we put them in every conceivable order to create a tour name which hits the spot…hopefully.

That is how it was for our new tour, a tour that visits both the Blair Street vaults and the Canongate graveyard.  But how do you convey all of this, whilst telling the audience it is a ghost tour? And fabulous?  

Not as easy as it sounds. Especially when you only have a 4 words to do it.  

Brevity is the soul of wit, but it is also the source of madness at Mercat Tours!  And so it was that the madness descended. Among the more ludicrous suggestions put forward by our staff.

• Fifty Shades of Grave
• Subterranean Homesick Ghouls
• ​Dead Good Tour

All were rejected. To be honest if we had chosen the first one, who knows what people would have expected to experience on the tour!  I know we use whips on our tours but...

So what did we choose in the end?  Our new tour was named DOOMED, Dead and Buried.  The reason I have used upper case letters, is that ‘doomed’ must be said  just like Private Fraser in Dad’s Army, in a deep booming Scottish voice.  So when you visit us on Blair Street, you will hear ‘DOOMED’ resonating throughout the office with fiendish glee.