Daddy cool

Published on Friday 3 July 2009 13:29

A COLLEAGUE wrote a couple of weeks ago that youngsters would be gleefully chanting Alice Cooper's anthem School's Out as the summer holidays got under way. Yet the prospect of entertaining my seven-year-old son, his five-year-old brother and their two-year-old sister for the best part of two months brings to my mind another Cooper classic: Welcome To My Nightmare.

It doesn't help that half the places in Edinburgh in which we would ordinarily expect to occupy the infants seem to be shutting down.

Much to the chagrin of our three water babes, the Royal Commonwealth Pool is closed for two years for "refurbishment". Two years? Surely that's about the same length of time as it took to construct the damn thing in the first place.

The National Portrait Gallery has been out of action for aeons, and the City Art Centre has pulled down the shutters for the foreseeable future. The Royal Museum of Scotland, too, has been half-closed for ages (and will remain so for a further two years), so if your children want to see obsolete stuffed beasts staring dumbly back at them with unseeing eyes, they'll have to make do with being plonked in front of the human zoo that is Big Brother.

One place that was very much open for business, however, was the Royal Highland Show. The children were captivated by the sights, sounds and smells of agricultural life. Particularly the smells. But never mind the bullocks, as the Sex Pistols almost said, as all creatures great and small provided a spectacular, informative and entertaining start to summer. If you only manage to go to one large outdoor gathering a year with your children, a) you should get out more, and b) you should make it the Royal Highland Show.

Incidentally, and on a completely unrelated matter, never underestimate the power of positive thinking – coupled with a strongly worded letter and the thinly veiled threat of legal action – when it comes to requesting a place for your son or daughter at the school of your choice.

This time last month we were forced to wait while the powers that be determined whether our younger son would be allocated a primary-one place at the same school as his elder brother. He had initially been denied but after we appealed the decision, common sense uncharacteristically prevailed and the boys will start P1 and P3 at the same fine educational establishment. Roll on August.

Andrew Hoyle is deputy chief sub-editor of Scotland on Sunday