Saturday, 28 June 2014

SCHOOL'S OUT

Ishbel and Alastair finished school on Wednesday, June 25 (2014) and return August 13th.


I collected them on their last day and enjoyed sitting in the garden looking through some of their workbooks.


Along with that, of course, are masses and masses of strawberries for lunch!



Alastair has a book (in Scotland called a "jotter") where each week he is to write a short story of about 6 sentences starting with a exuberant opening sentence.


Here is his report after the 70th Birthday Party we held in May.



"What a super weekend I had! On Saturday I went to my Granny's birthday party.  Then I walked to a fire station and it started to rain.  We got to go inside the fire station.  We were very excited. We saw a real fire engine. Sunday I went to ralf's Birthday.  He was going.... " [next page].

The story of our trip to the local neighbourhood fire department (before the garden party started) is in a previous blog (Sunday May18th)  here.


By way of celebrating that school holidays have started we had an afternoon 'inventure' into Glasgow city centre yesterday.  'Inventures' as I have explained elsewhere are Alastair's word for 'adventures'... and, by definition, we head off with a rough idea of Going Out but no exact plan as to where or by what mode of transport.

Our plan for this 'inventure' was to find an ice-cream shop called Big Licks!  What a great name!  After we ran an errand for our friend Anne we parked the car and the kids elected to travel into the city by bus and it had to be a double-decker.  No problem there; there are plenty and I have my blue (free) bus card to the Over 65's.  Off we went and we had a great outing!


We ended up in the city centre and had a few laughs as we chatted to various folk on our travels.  I guess we looked like what we were: Granny and 2 kids out for the day!  These days (maybe always?) Glaswegians are up for meeting and greeting visitors as we head toward to the Commonwealth Games.  I have realised that once they hear my accent they think I am a visitor to the city (well, I am, in one sense, certainly) and so there's lots of chat ... and directions ... and explanations ... starting with the much used Glasgow expression "To let ya un'erstand..."!


After another bus ride (always on the top deck) we found Big Licks on Argyle Street.  It's a somewhat unpreposing place (and no toilet which meant an urgent side-trip to some bushes for Alastair) but definitely lovely ice-cream.  There were no queues when we were there but apparently this is common!


They even sell Irn-Bru ice-cream.  This is something we have recently discoverd ...more on this anon.

Thereafter we had a couple more trips of hopping on and off buses to get back home.  It was a great outing if a bit chocolatey with Grandma being the worst off for melting ice-cream everywhere!

And the best quote of the day?  Upon clambouring up to the top deck of the bus when we first set off the kids both exclaimed "Hey! No seatbelts!"



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