Armstrong

Today's big highlight was meant to be our daughter's visit to the National Portrait Gallery with her school class. My wife volunteered to go along as a parent-helper and I made a brief visit during my lunchbreak. To be honest, my wife and I were a bit disappointed. Most of the time seemed to have been spent in a closed off room doing 'workshop' activities. That is, all the usual colouring, glueing, arts and crafts that children her age are already pretty adept. These are also things they can do perfectly well at their own school! So it seemed a waste of an opportunity that staff didn't spend more time showing and explaining the museum's paintings and photographs to them.

Later I had a chat with an assistant working on a shoot of 'Pramface' for the BBC outside the main bus station. I wasn't super happy with the portraits I took of her, partly because she was a bit shy and I should have worked a bit harder to get a stronger pose. But mostly because she was wearing a yellow-hazard-jacket and I challenge anybody to take a decent portrait with one of those things in the picture.

Instead, this is a bloke who goes around Edinburgh wearing a giraffe outfit. I saw him at Festival time and naively thought he was plugging a fringe show. I also remember seeing a blip of him around that time. It seemed that's not correct, and instead he wears this costume when out and about. Apparently this outfit somehow motivates him to do various good deeds for people in town.