Bats Can Smell Them With Their Ears

We did something Summer Holidayish with the kids! They go back to school next week and we finally got our act together. We went down to Glasgow to go to the "Glasgow Science Place" where one of the kids' favourite TV shows Nina and the Neurons is filmed. I love exploratory hands on science places like this, but this trip was hard work. I twatted my back last week and have been hobbling around very slowly, very painfully ever since (some days, getting out of bed has been a major and painful operation) and after two hours sat in the car both of kids had energy to burn, so, as soon as we were in through the doors, both of them were off, like rats up a drainpipe, pushing levers, pulling handles, and twisting knobs all over the place. As soon as Holly had found a brand new, ultra-fascinating, hands-on, vaguely educational thing to play with, (and I had got my head around which Basic Principle of Physics it was trying to demonstrate, but before I had worked out how to convert my high school science lessons - augmented by 30 years of 'real life' - understanding of the Basic Principle into Holly compatible terminology) she was off somewhere else whanging another lever back and forth, making another set of magnets bang into each other, leaving me to creak back onto my feet and stagger after her.
I soon swapped her for Daisy, who was a lot more biddable and a bit slower on her feet. At one point we encountered some of those giant distorting mirrors that used to be big fun at fairgrounds in the days before sophistication set in. Daisy loved them, "Look! I'm fat!" - and I have to admit so did I - not because they made me look fat, I don't need any help in that direction, but because for a second in one of them I saw Daisy stretched tall and thin. She didn't look like the cute little three year old girl at my side at all. I was seeing her as she will look when she she is eight or nine. It was a very strange moment. I was as if I was looking into the future. As she ran off to peer at her self in another weird mirror my back creaked painfully and I farted, both loudly and noisomely, and I thought "...and this is what I will be like when I'm eighty..."