I took a crash course in Taylor Swift studies… but nothing could have prepared me for her brilliance

A recent inclusion on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour setlist has the singer reimagining a brief love affair as an alien abduction. She is beamed up in ‘a cloud of sparkling dust’ and, on some spaceship never described, is smitten by her captor.

Then, all too soon, she lands back on Earth with a bump with no option but to carry on with her old life.

This Monday morning, the city of Edinburgh can surely relate to the song Down Bad.

For three nights the world’s biggest music star played the abductress and some 220,000 of us were duly captured and placed under her spell.

Now her spaceship is moving on and we are staying put. Edinburgh is returning to type. ‘You’ll have had your Taylor Swift,’ it tells us.