Pipes

Believe it or not I had to back down to Aberdeen again today!

But it was a lot more fun. First of all no one stuck a camera anywhere, which has to be a winner. Secondly I had the company of my first born and thirdly it was a beautiful day.

By pure chance Ruairidh had an appointment with the asthma specialist today. After the past couple of weeks I have had enough of hospitals and planes but needs must.

Ruairidh has had asthma since a baby (our family has a quality atopic pedigree going back 4 maybe 5 generations... not genes you hand on lightly!). But for the most part we have managed his condition well and kept on top of it. The past year has been tricky though and our GP reckoned it was time to pull in the big guns.

I have to say, he had a great time. Not only did he get to fly to Aberdeen, which is far better than the average Tuesday straight away. But when we got there he got to do loads of fun tests involving blowing into things and causing computers to do stuff but his consultant turned out to be a great laugh, talked to Ruairidh rather than me (for most of the time), spent ages of time with him, explained everything in great detail and was very, very helpful.

Oddly, before we went, the only thing that Ruairidh was concerned about was that he wasn't looking forward to seeing all those "Weird big pretend happy pictures they always have in kids hospitals." I couldn't quite figure out what he meant but it seemed to be some distant memory of brief visits to children wards as a toddler which have left an image of scary clowns, happy pirates and monkeys.

Imagine both our delight to find Aberdeen Children's Hospital sprinkled with fabulous bits of modern art. We stumbled across a wonderful fantastic forests, dramatic windows of coloured glass and delightful little picture postcards. We particulary liked the stand of multicoloured metal pipes at the entrance to A&E.

There was still the odd clown and pirate but Ruairidh decided these were OK as they were well done. Ever the critic...!

All in all a far better day than yesterday. But even so I think I shall resist the temptation to fly to Aberdeen for a while.