then it took no time

I don't think Edgar was asleep for all of the way to the newly-re-opened museum, which is unfortunate as he might then have heard me say a naughty word when a woman jumped out in front of me from the crowd of patriotic morons lining the Royal Mile an entire day in advance of that wedding thing. Hopefully he appreciated me diverting round Jeffrey, Market and Bank streets rather than juddering him up the less steep but cobblier second section of the High Street.

Whilst it was nice to see the Great Hall almost untouched by the nastier sorts of progress it was reasonably upsetting to see my favourite animal-based portions of the exhibits so severely buggered-up. There used to be a room full of insects, other non-insectile arthropods, molluscs and what I shall always think of as coelenterates (though that term is now deprecated in favour of cnidaria and ctenophora); gone, probably only accessible-by-appointment-and-with-a-sound-reason at the Granton facility. There used to be a case containing various hominin skulls and primate skellingtons; skellingtons gone, skulls less effectively shown. There used to be lots of animals in glass cases with bits of their appropriate environment on the floor around them with sober, descriptive information-cards describing them; gone, replaced by a few selective EXTREME examples, set on featureless white plinths (or, in the case of the sharks, geese, sirenians, cetaceans (and one unfortunate isolated artiodactyl which appears to be being chased by a crocodilian), hanging inappropriately from the ceiling) in a room with insufficient space to promenade genteely through the exhibits and insufficiently quiet to be able to sadly describe what used to be there to the youngster into whose hair one is gently weeping. The spot-the-seagull display is gone, the roomful of stuffed birds (including the case of TITS) scattered to the four walls and very ineffectively presented, shoehorned where possible into the new vaguely-thematic displays rather than simple being presented alongside related species just for the hell of it.

I only got there an hour before closing (Edgar was off nursery, allegedly with a disease of which he had stopped displaying symptoms last weekend, so I was taking the afternoon off work and had done a couple of jobs at home before getting round to leaving) so couldn't look round everything but it very much appears to be worth waiting until school term starts again in order to have space to wander around and for it to be sufficiently quiet to be able to think, the north galleries being filled with vaguely interactive things for children to shout at.