Boys Day

Over seven years ago, when we only had young Boris, (Norris and Doris were yet to even be considered), we had a child-care crisis. The only resolution we managed to find was that I re-arranged my hours at work (and cut them a bit) leaving me free to cover the missing day in the schedule. 'Boris' immediately named these occasions, "Boys Day" - and even though he was but a toddler we explored all kinds of places. He wasn't quite big enough for mountain-climbing, but we did have a book of all the decent waterfalls in Scotland, huge numbers of which we walked/clambered, to with him on my back in the redoubtable 'MacPac'.

Our 'boys day' jollity was rudely halted however, firstly by the appearance of further offspring and subsequently by the requirements of education. Today however has been boys-day revisited! Young Norris was very disappointed to have missed a school trip to the Glasgow Transport Museum because of a hospital appointment, so today we left little Doris at home with Mum (to do gardening!) and jumped on the train to Glasgow, and following a hasty pizza, took Glasgow's mad little underground train to Kelvinhall.

The Transport Museum is a great place, not only is it stuffed full of beautiful old steam locomotives from Glasgow's past, but it has got an amazing collection of old cars, trams, motorbikes, and model ships - memories of the Clyde's industrial heritage. Most amazingly, access to all of this is completely free, saving a few pennies with which to delight the kids in the inevitable tat-shop at the end of their tour.

Perspective is a strange thing! Looking at a Caley Single-Wheeler (that's a steam engine that's over a century old, by the way) in a museum alongside a Hillman Hunter, Talbot Horizon and a Honda 400 'super dream' exactly like the ones my Dad drove when I was a kid -was interesting. What was equally interesting was the way in which the kids saw little difference between the respective ages of these various antiquarian relics. They have tendencies to view 'the past' as being as uniform a moment in time as 'the present'. The fact that they clearly view me as a lingering irrelevance from this undifferentiated and long-forgotten era is as amusing as it is increasingly accurate.

One quiet corner of the museum has a sobering memorial to all those killed at Lockerbie.