looking on

Although it's a little bit of a pain in the arse for all Nicky's school-peer-group to come through here to visit us seeing as we have only a teeny two-room flat and they all live in either Glasgow or Ayr they popped through today with their various youngsters and babies for a sit, chat, walk, pop-to-museum-of-childhood,walk,eat,wander,play in the park, wander, sit, chat, cup of tea and then a taxi back to the station for a return journey which was hopefully a little less delayed than the one on the way in. Those travelling by train had three childrens between four adults to cope with which resulted in one child sitting down on the floor of the concourse in Waverley with its little arms folded. The delay meant that it got to go up an exciting staired alley instead of a dull lightly-sloping street to the target café though we then had to go down the lightly-sloping street to meet the others who had gone on ahead but stopped short of where we thought they were going. We had a good half-hour of sun to sit in (and be afraid of in my case; I'd forgotten my hat so had to put on some sunscreen) whilst eating our coffees and cakes (or burgers in Scott's case) before it suddenly went pleasantly cool and lightly rainy resulting in a scramble for coats and putting-up of hoods. Strange how wearing sunglasses with anorak hoods enabled and a fleecy top beneath makes people look more like tourists than sunglasses alone. The seven-week old Stuart-and-Fiona-offspring slept throughout; it had to be deliberately awakened to be fed earlier and didn't even wake up when a stagful of pissed Novacastrians started shouting a few feet away.

The original plan when planning for everyone to come through had been to do one of the open-topped bus tour things but the taking-the-piss pricing begat the alternative plan of just wandering around the old town for a bit. As it was raining we ended up in the Museum of Childhood, probably designed more for adults than children (despite the amusing sinisterness of many of the exhibits) though it didn't stop the childs present from demanding that they each have bought for them a particularly noisy toy space-gun in the souvenir shop. Perhaps they need a few more years' toy-use and recognition of their own changing mental processes before they can fully appreciate the weird crap kids used to have to play with before micro-electronics and bakelite were invented.

I thought we'd get laughed at when asking for a table for eight adults, three child and a baby in a pram at lunchtime on a Saturday in the town centre but it was achieved with barely a hitch, the single little hitchlet being the waiter's inability to work out the total number of chairs required and having to ask me. Luckily the large-echoing space was already reasonably noisy so the additional child-shrieks weren't too prominent. I was assigned to hang back with the baby's parents whilst they fed it in order to be able to shepherd them to the next target location (the nearest play-park) to which everyone else would head off earlier. As the route I had to give them was necessarily simpler-but-longer than the more direct route I didn't think people carrying a baby would want to take (lots of steep steps, though they said they didn't mind and if they were being polite they should know my slight inability to comprehend the conventions of social lying by now) but which we eventually took anyway we ended up beating everyone else to the park as they'd gone slightly the wrong way and been distracted by a graveyard en route. I didn't find out until later that a couple of people had generated entirely the wrong idea about where they were due to all the steps, twists and turns and came close to asking an apocryphal-tourist-question concerning the wee tower thing on the top of Calton Hill and the castle.

Perhaps because they didn't eat most of the food ordered for them the childs seemed to quickly tire of park and also of the mildly uphill route back to the flat for coffee and tea and more foodstuffs, though the wisdom of offering sugary chocolate brownies to childs who will shortly have to spend an hour on a train not running about screaming was lost on me. Perhaps that's what Kirsty's concerned expression was for.