Please Sir - Can I Have Some More.

I'm working about 24 hours late at the moment, but I'll use artistic licence and write as though it is still yesterday.

Today, our U3A had a meeting at the National Museum of Scotland; we weren't happy, perhaps we're excessively fussy or, Heaven forbid, pedantic. The plan was to visit the Viking exhibition but we arrived late so we just had a quick look around, met the others for lunch, another quick look, then off to the Grassmarket for Mrs TD to buy some embroidery yarns. We will probably return for the Vikings.

So what were the complaints? It is uncoordinated, uninformative and trivial. We were side-tracked to the Iranian Art section, there were five pieces there, two of which were pottery, and the particular sample in the blip epitomises the problem. It is a lovely piece of work but, it is a small part of a hookah style smoking pipe, now they may not have the complete item but how about a picture of what it might look like, the environment in which it was used, a diagram of how it works and a description of its place in the society.
Surely Iranian Art merits more than five pieces, there is the incredible culture of carpet weaving, after all, when people talk of Oriental carpets, which are made all over the Orient, they use the term Persian carpets; the space occupied by the display could have comfortably housed double the number of items.

I know Lady Findhorn had a wonderful blip from there on Monday, but it's a museum, a place of education; I want to be fascinated. I looked for information on the racing car in her blip, what could I find out about it? It's a racing car. Wow. That was from a computerised information system.

And just don't get me started on the grumpy cafe staff who reluctantly served us with coffee to go with the lunch we bought - it was lukewarm.

Rant over, tomorrow will be happier.