My son is currently in primary one of primary school. He is still at the stage that he likes me to take part in things so when he recently went on a school trip he was happy when I asked him if he would like me to put my name down to help out (the school had asked for parents to volunteer to help).

The trip was about an hour’s drive away to a folk museum. I had never been before so it was a first for me too.

It was a really interesting museum – most museums that I had visited previously involved looking at exhibits hidden behind glass inside a building. Quite boring really! Much of this museum was set outside and, rather than looking at exhibits behind glass, you actually got to see how people lived years ago. There were crofts still up from the last century and rooms were still untouched, left as they were so that people could really see how people lived in olden times. In some crofts there were smoky fires burning too so that you can imagine life without electricity and smell the smells of the fires that they would have smelt in the olden days. There was even an old school room – equipped with wooden desks, inkwells and a belt.

In the midst of all this, we visited a house, which had a bed in the sitting room opposite the fire (this was, we were told, to keep people warm when they went to bed, because of the fact that there was no central heating in those days). Leading from that room was a kitchen. In the kitchen was an old rusty black box type thing, with a door, sitting on top of a stove. I imagined that this was for keeping things as warm as possible when they were cooked (things were cooked on the fire), as there would have been nothing in those days to keep them warm. Imagine then when one five year old shouts “look, there”s where they keep the microwave’!

Out of the mouths of babes!