A Progress Tour

I'm a very lucky person and I get to leave the country a lot. However, June half-term tends to be a staycation. This has been a lovely one. On Friday night I did something with my son that would never happen in any 1940s childhood. I took him to his first stadium gig - Take That's opening night of the Progress tour at Sunderland's Stadium of Light.








It was a fabulous show and he completely loved it.

The next day we went into Newcastle and visited the Laing Art gallery. It's got some fabulous paintings by the Cullercoats Artists and Ashington Miners. The most fun was trying to do self-portraits on a posh etchasketch:













Then we were straight off to Scotland to stay with friends in Bathgate. On Saturday we went to Dynamic Earth which is a fabulous museum covering the history of the planet via interactive exhibits. The best room is the arctic biome which has an iceberg in it - leading to lots of putting cold hands up each other's backs - and a video screen in the floor which looks like an ice hole with seals and penguins swimming below.

Yesterday we went to visit another friend near Dunbar and had one of the simple 1940s pleasures in life. Playing in the garden and walking through fields looking at an incredible view over the Firth of Forth and the Bass Rock which my iPhone camera singularly failed to capture well.







Now we are in rural Northumbria with another friend and her sons. There has been a game of hide and seek going on with the boys for about 12 hours and now they're playing board games happily as we sit in the conservatory nursing coffee. Bliss.

We have made excellent progress on our tour round my friends and their lovely lives.

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