Yuck! Normal life resumes.....

That first day of normality after holidays is always awful. Last night when I set the weekday alarm on my phone for 6:25 am, my heart sank.

This Summer has been, despite the weather, one of the best ever. We've done loads. First of all we had the first week of July up on the Black Isle, which surely has to be one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I mean, look at this:

Bob also had the last two weeks of the holidays off work. While we didn't go away, we had some great fun at the Festival, seeing Alan Davies, Sandi Toksvig, Toby Hadoke, the Comedy Club for Kids, a very amusing debut show by comedian Hayden Cohen called Age of the Geek and a fabulous production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Botanics. The three links are to reviews I've written for Festival Journal and to the booking page for the Geek show. I will review the others when I get round to it.

We also had days out at Dare Protoplay in Dundee. Again Anna was a junior judge in the video games competition and again the gender balance of the teams was a cause for concern. There were only two women out of fifteen members of the winning teams. This s a problem because you then get the industry developing games that girls aren't interested in, or which show rape as a way of building character, or other violence against women. I wrote last year about the need to address this. 

We had our night away in Bearsden where Anna took over my Twitter account and we went to Jupiter Artland in West Lothian and the Scottish Deer Centre in Fife. 

It was all pretty blissful, really. I even managed to read a few books - the Hunger Games Trilogy and Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy are both brilliant - and, of course, there was the small matter of Olympics addiction. London put on a spectacular show and gave a good account of the UK as a fabulous place to visit. And Team GB showed us the benefits of the UK working together to produce excellence and support our sportspeople properly.

One thing about not going away, though - people tend to think that they can still expect you to do stuff which means that you don't really get to properly switch off. And sometimes you end up doing it because it's quick and you might as well. 

Today came as a huge shock. That 6:25 alarm was most unwelcome, especially when it was accompanied by torrential rain. Mind you, it's really irritating going back to school in bright sunshine, so I guess we can't really complain about that. 

To add insult to injury, the first thing I saw in my inbox was an email from Amazon emblazoned with the words END OF SUMMER SALE. Just rub it in, why don't you? I know it was for a sale, but I don't really need any more encouragement to buy any more from them. 

I really missed Bob and Anna when they went out this morning. 

Now I have an eye-watering To Do list to get through and I don't think we'll stop again until Christmas. At least I'm sufficiently recharged to tackle it.

My daughter's Twitter "reign of terror"

Weeks ago, I got an email from Premier Inn advertising very, very cheap rooms. I decided to book one for a quick night away during our two week holiday. We're spending the time at home mainly because we wanted to do the Festival seriously.

I hadn't realised when booking that 12th August was the night of the Olympics closing ceremony, but you can't change the date with these cheap offers so, off we went. As it turned out, having some exploring to do the next day made the ending of the Olympics a little more bearable for us.

After a delicious dinner in the Burnbrae pub in Bearsden,we went back to our room and watched the ceremony. We were all laughing and joking about it. I can't quite remember how, but Anna started typing my tweets for me. I then told her she could be my official Twitter correspondent for the evening if she wanted, a challenge she embraced with relish and her customary quirkiness.

She loved it - and I was very grateful to those of my friends who chatted to her through the evening. At one point, I did actually utter the words "tweet what you want". So, for the avoidance of doubt, I want to make it absolutely clear that I can't stand Justin Bieber and I feel many emotions towards David Cameron, but love is most definitely not one of them. Oh, and I never said Twilight was better written than Doctor Who, but I am quite happy to admit to liking it. In fact, I even reviewed it here. It's a bit embarrassing that I said the books were essentially chaste before I'd read Breaking Dawn but never mind.

Oh, and, yes, I did blub my heart out when the Spice Girls came on. I love them and am not embarrassed to admit it. Those tears were nothing to what happened when Gary Barlow came on, though. How incredibly brave for him to tackle a pretty emotional song at the end of the ceremony, just before the flame went out, just 8 days after his little daughter Poppy was stillborn.

We'll never forget the 2012 Olympics, but Anna's tweets gave us an even more special reason to remember the closing ceremony. I had to save her self styled reign of terror for posterity, so here they are in a Storify thingy.

Summer Holidays: Play in a week with Firefly Arts

Just before we went on holiday, Anna did Firefly Art's Play in a Week course. In just 24 hours across 4 days, her group of 14 children wrote, produced and rehearsed a 20 minute play. Then, on the Friday, they met with 2 other groups from West Lothian and all 3 plays were performed at Howden Park Centre in Livingston.

The 3 plays were all completely different. The Livingston group portrayed a young girl whose parents were going through a divorce. She found her friends' obsessions with boys, diet and clothes vacuous in comparison to her traumas and ran away, returning to give her mother support in the end.  Linlithgow added a touch of the supernatural with some dramatic psychics helping to investigate the disappearance of local children. Anna's group, which had been based in Bathgate, covered the Second World War. Two modern day schoolchildren, wondering how to find something interesting about the war, listened as the librarian told stories which were enacted on stage by the others.  It wasn't always historically accurate, but I liked the empathy that the play expressed with what people were going through - families being split up, the effects of rationing, children having to abide by the curfew and help observe the blackouts.  Anna did her first ever solo singing performance at the end with one verse of "Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag".

She thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The skills that week developed are huge - from working in a team, to meeting deadlines, building confidence, encouraging creativity, organising a project - and all with total strangers. She gained much more in that week than the £30 that I paid out. I'm sure that the experience would have helped her cope calmly with the experience of a tv interview this week.

I had initially wanted to get her on Film in a Week, given that she's always making videos, but there were no places left by the time I'd found out about it. This involved a group of 20 or so children producing a 20 minute film which was also screened that night. They learned the technical side as well as developing the screenplay, which was about two rival tribes trying to find treasure chests and having to work together to do it.

Projects like this are really important for young people's development and they need to remain accessible. If we want the next generation to grow up competent and confident, then we can't allow public spending cuts to kill off opportunities like this for them, or confine them to being the privilege of the most affluent.

Summer Holidays - Swallow Cottage, Munlochy Bay

This is the view from Swallow Cottage which sits slightly above Munlochy Bay, on the Black Isle just north of Inverness.  It was taken at around 7.30 am on Friday 6th August and as you can see, at high tide, the surface of the bay is like glass.

We spent a week of our holidays there and I'm probably mad giving you the link, because we want to go back. The visitors' book is full of people who have returned time and time again to take advantage of the spectacular scenery. In fact, I was quite concerned when, having read through it, that one family who seem to have been there every year since the cottages were first let in 2001, didn't come this year. Hannah family from Glasgow, I hope you're all ok.

From our vantage point on the terrace, looking at that gorgeous view, we saw all manner of wildlife - not just the friendly goats who would come to visit. Bob saw ospreys, red kite, buzzards. However claims that our neighbours in the semi detached Roebuck Cottage had seen a wild cat were met with derision by my friend Gavin who knows about these things and who suggested that it was probably a large tabby.

The road in to the cottage is not for the faint hearted. You turn off the A832 Cromarty road just before Avoch. The single track road you join is like a motorway compared to what's to come.  One night we cane back and found a mummy grouse and her little chick wandering in the middle of this road, not having much of a clue what the verge was for. We were held up for ages until they decided to opt out of a bend and go straight on down a dirt track. Bob came across them a couple of days later, too.

After about a mile and a half, you turn off again. The road narrows significantly and there's grass growing in the middle of it. There is still tarmac, but it kind of just peters out. After half a mile or so, you come to a lovely viewpoint at the mouth of the bay and then the road really gets interesting. The tarmac is no more. You have a beautiful dry stane dyke on your right and, on your left, after some fields and cottages, is a significant drop into an old quarry. There is a fence, but as Anna said, it's only wire and sticks between you and a hefty bump. At the end you come to what the directions euphemistically describe as a sharp left hand turn. Yes, so sharp that you can't do it in one. Thankfully there is a turning point. We managed it quite easily in a Micra so I wouln't worry too much about how you're going to get there, but I wouldn't do it in the Winter time.

The road in and the peaceful location fool you into thinking that you've gone to the middle of nowhere and beyond, but in reality you are only 20 minutes from Inverness and an hour and a bit from the glorious Wester Ross coastline which really does have a thrill round every bend. We went on a day trip to Ullapool and took the coast road round to Gairloch and back to Inverness. It's around 170 miles in all, but well worth it for some of the most spectacular scenery you will ever see - rocky, mountainous coastline, unspoilt beaches of the most beautiful golden sand, views over to Skye and beyond.  By the way, if you go to Ullapool, you'll see a chip shop, called rather arrogantly The Chippy,  which advertises itself as having won awards, and maybe it has, but on that day, we had the worst fish and chips we had ever had. Way too much batter even for me, flavourless fish and skinny little ordinary chips that you could get anywhere - all with service which bordered indifferent and surly. Our local chippy in Livingston would beat them hands down.

Back to the cottage, it's very comfortable and almost perfect. When you arrive you find that not only have you been left a welcome pack of the staples like butter, milk, bread, tea and coffee, but also a basket of muffins. Ours were chocolate with white chocolate chips on the top. The kitchen is well equipped with a washer dryer and a dishwasher.

There are two bedrooms, both with big en-suite bathrooms with over-bath showers. The one criticism I'd make is that the mattresses on all the beds are incredibly soft. I like mine to be a bit harder, but I have to be honest and say that I still managed to sleep very well.

Upstairs there's a tv room with well stocked bookcases.  It's the view from the big window, though, which takes your attention.

What would make the place perfect would be wi-fi, although I'm sure that many people would disagree that you either want or need internet acesss on holiday. It would have been good to have been able to look up places to visit - although there is a huge, fat file of ideas of things to do - and we didn't even scratch the surface.

When I saw on the internet when we booked that there was a payphone, I prepared myself for not having mobile reception, but in some parts of the cottage and on the patio, it was fine.

We just loved the cottage and hope to be able to get back there next year - it really is a perfect base for us and suits all 3 of us.

Anna's been interviewed for Channel 4!

The Edinburgh Science Festival is always a feature of the Easter Holidays for us and last year Anna discovered there that she could get the chance to be a public judge at the Dare Protoplay event in Edinburgh in August.

This is basically a competition organised by the University of Abertay for teams of game designers who have been locked away developing their entries since 7th June.

She went along last year and loved trying out all the games and giving feedback to the competitors. 

She was obviously keen to go along again this year and that's where she's been all day. One of the organisers said to Bob that they were pleased to see her back because they get so few girls who are interested in this kind of stuff.

While she was there today, she was interviewed for Channel 4 for a later programme. Bob said she was answering questions quite calmly in front of the camera for about 5 minutes. I remember my first experience of  a tv interview in 1986 at the Paisley SDP conference and I was absolutely petrified. 

She is particularly passionate about one game which I won't identify at the moment until we know the results, but it sounds really good. A bit anti establishment as well as an interesting game. I wonder why that appealed to her...........

Edinburgh Fringe: The Comedy Club 4 Kids

Due to work, by-elections and illness, I haven't been near the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for years, but yesterday we went in with my sister and her children, none of whom had ever seen the colourful and varied array of street performers who take over the High Street in August. They were amazed by the woman with nearly 7000 piercings and the various "statues" - although they may not have been as taken with the heavily bronzed young man wearing nothing but a gold garment which just concealed his modesty as my sister and I were. We were solely impressed by his ability to maintain his statue positions, of course.

Our first stop, though, was at the High Court, where a nice man called Ian was making balloons.

A while and two monkeys, an alien, a monkey and a penguin later, we had 5 happy children. Elmo and the Penguin survived intact until the end of the day, but the others all sustained various deflations and injuries.

We took advantage of the Historic Scotland memberships we took out at Fort George last week to go to Edinburgh Castle. It was so busy that we didn't get round everywhere, but there was a funny moment while we queued to see the Crown Jewels when my sister gathered us all round and suggested we make a plan to steal them. Unfortunately our hastily concocted idea of using the balloon animals as decoys didn't work - but maybe I blew our cover by tweeting about it. We also discovered that they make wonderful, if expensive, chips in the Queen Anne Cafe there. They taste and look home made and are worth the cost. Our cream teas, however, weren't as good as Linlithgow, though.

We took in a show too -  Comedy Club 4 Kids, at the Bongo Club. We had 5 kids with us - Anna, her cousin Ru who's the same age, her cousin Aimee, who's  5 and 13 year olds Emma and Charlotte.

This has become a must-see show for Anna in recent years and she was really excited about going. The principle is simple - it's like a normal comedy club - a succession of stand up comedians, but at a sociable hour and with no swearing or rude content.

Anna was desperate to be in the front row as she had been one of those "picked on" last year, but we got there too late for that, even though we arrived a good 20 minutes early for the 5.30 start.

The compere was James Campbell, an experienced children's comedian who was very, very funny.  He knew exactly how to get the audience eating out of his hand - animal stories with a touch of child appropriate rudeness formed the main theme of his first stint and subsequent linking slots. It didn't take me long to find this (not behind the paywall) Times interview with him from 2004.  You will be disappointed if you go looking for Byronesque good looks, though, as he's had a haircut and a shave since then.

The first guest performer was a young man called Will, one of the graduates of the London Comedy Academy for kids. When he finished his performance, he looked really disappointed with himself, but I think he showed loads of potential. It's certainly true that he didn't have people rolling in the aisles with laughter - but we were smiling. Perhaps his material - a joke about sat nav, for example, was just a little bit old for the age group he had in front of him, but he delivered it well. He could maybe have linked things together better but that, as well as fine tuning his ability to read and react to an audience will come with practice.  He had stage presence and the ability to gain the sympathy of the audience well. I think he may have fared better with an audience of teenagers.

The second guest performer was James Acaster who was also very funny, telling stories about learning to juggle as a cub scout and the like. There were a couple of times when you could see him pulling himself back from doing stuff a bit too grown up for his audience. He interacted well with the audience and wasn't afraid to look like a complete prat in the process, trying on some sunglasses in a bid to look cool. That was never going to happen while he was wearing old man's trousers, as I'm sure he was aware.

One thing I will add (this is much later as I forgot to put it in earlier) is that there were no women. Obviously the line up changes every year, but in 3 years of attending, there's only been 1 woman out of 9 performers. I'd be interested to know why that is and whether the organisers will address it in the future.

I think the show was well worth the £5 ticket price. It's also different every day so I'm tempted to go back this year. All the kids enjoyed it to the extent that we bought James Campbell's CD at the end.

Summer Holidays: A Day at East Links Family Park

I feel so rubbish today. Totally exhausted, and everything hurts. If I hadn't been so thirsty, I probably would have stayed in bed.

This is entirely down to me completely overdoing it yesterday when we went to the East Links Family Park near Dunbar. Bob and Anna went last year when I was ill, but it was a while since my only visit there and it's changed beyond all recognition. When I took Anna as a toddler, I remember feeling vaguely cheated that I'd driven the best part of 50 miles and paid loads of money for a slightly better version of the Almond Valley Heritage Centre down the road. However, they have clearly expanded in my absence, this year adding a huge play fortress. What's great about it is that there's loads of rope bridges, scramble nets and various obstacles for the kids, but you can also walk right to the top - and you can even get wheelchairs up there. The amount of thought that's gone into the design is really impressive. You can get down from the top in several ways, but I chose the quickest - down the 4 lane covered slide which you can see in the photo above. And I did it twice. That probably explains why my back hurts so much today but it was fun.

In addition to the Fortress, there is a large outdoor play area with go karts, little tractors for smaller children, a hill to sledge down, a flying fox which Anna said was one of the better ones she'd been on and various other of the usual sorts of playground things.

Mind you, hurtling myself down a slippery metal bumpy thing was nothing compared to the scariness of getting in a kart - one of those where the kids sit in the front and the adults pedal behind - with my husband. I'd long thought of hiring one of these in Mallorca, but that was before I found out what a maniac my dear husband of almost 22 years is at driving them. He did his best to frighten the living daylights out of me, especially on the section through the woods where, with nobody else around, he made it go really fast and swerve from side to side. At one point I actually screamed, much to Anna's (and Bob's) amusement. I have to say Anna was entirely on her Daddy's side on that one.  It's a long time since I've had such a fit of the giggles, though.

Any farm park is going to be full of the cute and this one was no exception, a cria (baby llama), a gosling which followed us around and was quite assertive with the older birds who tried to push it out of the way to steal its food and, sadly, orphaned 3 day old piglets being hand reared (every 2 hours) by the staff and a bambi were in addition to the usual farmyard crew of sheep, goats and chickens.

It cost us £29 to get in and I'd say it was value for money. I love the way these farm parks charge you to enter and then make you pay to feed their animals too - that cost us probably another £4, but to not do it would be cruel (to the children, not the animals).

The cafe was very good and, as these things go, reasonably priced.  Bob and I had well filled, tasty baguettes and hot chocolate, while Anna had 2 cheese toasties and Irn Bru and it came to £13.60. We returned later for a tea, coffee and more Irn Bru (well, it's the holidays) and a cake for Bob which cost another £5.70.

We also luckily ran into our friend Andrea, whom we hadn't seen in years, with her 2 children, Rhodri and Brianna.

All in all, it was a fabulous day out and I think we'll try and head back at Christmas to see what their Winter Wonderland is all about. Paul Freeman commented on an earlier post that there is a beautiful beach next door to the Farm Park, but we didn't get to see it yesterday. I was pretty tired when we left, and it was pouring with rain so we came straight home, but bear that in mind if you go there.

We're home!

We got back last night from a wonderful week at a holiday cottage on the Black Isle, just north of Inverness. I'm not sure I want to tell you where it is cos you'll all want to go there and we want to book for next year, but I probably will.

Our week away had everything we wanted:  family, particularly seeing my Auntie Anne and Uncle Dons for the first time since Anna was a baby, and having lots of quality time with my sister, brother in law, nieces and nephew; fun, frolics and mermaids on beaches; poignant moments in graveyards; excellent food and all that amidst the finest scenery on the planet.

I was especially proud of myself for only having one brief foray, bar a few tweets, onto the internet all week - and that was only because my sister hadn't got herself together enough to be ready for us going on a day trip on Monday. In particular, I am pleased that I managed to show sufficient restraint, when I heard about David Cameron's comments on social housing, to just leave be for the moment. I want to read what he actually said before I make comment, and I have no intention of doing so when the sun is shining outside and my sunlounger and book beckon.

I was thoroughly delighted, though, to hear of the demise of the awful Proposition 8, meaning that Californians will once again be able to marry the person they are in love with. All as it should be.

I didn't, however, completely avoid Liberal Democrats - in fact I actively sought them out at the Black Isle Show on Thursday. The field was big enough so that I could have done, especially as their were hidden away in a tiny corner next to the Free Presbyterian Church and some people selling double glazing. It was great to catch up with my friend Gavin and also George Lyon MEP (photographic evidence above) Cllrs Angela McLean and Biz Campbell and Alan MacRae, the PSPC for the new Ross-shire and Lochaber seat whose name escapes me. It was especially great to have a seat for a couple of hours given that I was a bit shattered from all the walking around.  Bob and Anna went off to the fairground and returned green around the gills after Bob stupidly decided to take them on the Waltzers to give them a thrill. Bob does not do fairground thrills. I made him go on the big wheel at the Goose Fair in Nottingham about 20 years ago and have felt pangs of guilt ever since because his suffering was very great, so he too was grateful for the seat and time to recover.

This week, blogging will continue to be light and what will be there won't always be entirely serious. I can't believe we're at the last full week of the Summer holidays already. We have trips planned to Blair Drummond Safari Park, East Links Farm Park near Dunbar and Edinburgh Castle (with my sister who is visiting at the end of the week) where we'll take advantage of our new Historic Scotland memberships which we took out at Fort George.

Now, where's that sunlounger?

It's the Summer Holidays!

Anna is now on holiday for the next 7 weeks! It was great to turn off the alarm clock so that we didn't have to get up at 7:20. Neither of us really like these early mornings and I'm looking forward to having some lie-ins.

Typically, though, after weeks of gorgeous sunshine, today it's tipping it down with rain. I hope this isn't going to continue until 18th August. In some ways it would be better if we structured our school year so that the Summer holidays were in May and June, cos that's when we get the best of the weather up here.

Anna came home yesterday clutching a Head Teacher's Award for "Effort in class work in P6". Only one child from each class was given one so I had to share that proud mummy moment with you.

Plans for our holidays include, later on, a week away in a lovely cottage near Inverness, a trip to Newcastle next week for the Doctor Who exhibition which I was too sick to take her to see when it was in Glasgow, going to see Eclipse when it comes out next week, a week at a drama course, catching up with friends (that'll be you, Alex, Pippa and Louise) and lots of chilling and having fun.

In other exciting news, our tickets for Doctor Who Live in Glasgow in October arrived the other day.

Can you tell we're a bit partial to Doctor Who in this house?

Anyway, I hope we get to have a lovely, relaxed, chilled Summer.