I was back in Fife last weekend for my sister’s 30th birthday. My Dad has finally tumbled to the fact that cans of beer left in a draughty cupboard for a couple of hours before a shindig do not become chilled to any perceptible degree, and so this time round a pair of ice-laden pails took pride of place under the dining room table. There was cold beer to be drunk, and I drank it. It was a good night.

The next morning, goaded out of bed about four hours earlier than my hangover would have liked, I had some tea and toast for breakfast, then suited up and jumped on my bike. Today was a manifold experiment: how long would Buckhaven to Edinburgh take along the Fife Coastal Path? Would a heart-rate monitor/cycle computer be useful? And most importantly, would the one-two punch of a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer and a Stuart’s scotch pie be the match of 60 kilometres of winding coastline?

This final question was an ad hoc addition to the day’s challenges, brought about by my complete failure to bring any cycling-friendly snacks with me in the first place. The caramel wafer was provided at my Gran’s house a mile or so along the road — a distance just far enough to warm up, followed by a tea break just long enough to cool down again — and the pie was safely ensconced in my backpack, bought at Stuart’s in Buckhaven before I left and ready for consumption somewhere down the road. A cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit, a pie and some lycra: my loins were girded.

I hit the coastal path just beyond Kinghorn, exchanging fast but worrisome B-roads for gravel paths and startled pedestrians for the next fifteen miles. It was a great day: cloudy but bright; cold but not windy, and I gradually forgot where I was as the miles rolled by. I’ve always been a bit less than enthusiastic about the south coast of Fife (familiarity breeding contempt, maybe) but it was a lovely cycle; the harbours, fishing cottages, old woods and train lines, with the quiet rustle and slap of the dark water of the Forth behind it all, put me in mind of a highland lochside.

I climbed up and over the Forth Road Bridge and freewheeled down into South Queensferry about an hour and three quarters after having left Buckhaven, rested my bike against a wall and collapsed, sweaty and smelly, onto a bench in the shadow of the rail bridge. My pie was calling.

This was no ordinary pie: Stuart’s are the founders of the World Scotch Pie Championships, and have won it countless times; their arch-nemeses W.F. Stark face them across College Street and snatched the crown a couple of years ago. This was a pie whose shell bore the weight of history, expectation and tradition. The fat had frozen into little white pools on the top of the crust, and yet this only made it more appealing. It was a glistening, golden-brown cylinder of meaty joy, and I ate it with gusto. And a coffee from a café over the road.

God, it was excellent. 500-odd calories of bakery genius, a smart-bomb of beef, mutton and lard, and it propelled me home over the last 15 kilometres. My heart-rate monitor told the full story: 60 kilometres, two and three-quarter hours and not one but four pies’ worth of calories expended. I was ravenous for the next two days.