We had a lovely day out in Edinburgh yesterday, keeping well away from Princes Street. I’m from Glasgow and we laughingly call such a trip capital punishment.

First we visited the National Gallery of Modern Art, it has free plentiful parking and free entry so no worries there.

We used to take our boys to the gallery quite often when they were wee, you can’t start them off too young. I can’t tell you how impressed an art teacher was when one of them recognised a Henry Moore from a photograph.

Unfortunately there is a Damien Hirst exhibition on at the moment and it just left me completely cold. Fish, a dead sheep and a medicine cabinet. I just don’t get it at all and to me his whole career has come about because the so called experts weren’t brave enough to stand up and say what garbage his ‘art’ really is. The diamond encrusted skull was so unoriginal and boring.

I watched Newsnight Review last night and Kirsty Wark and company seemed to be surprised by how bad his attempts at more traditional art were. Actually, they wondered if he had deliberately made poor attempts as they didn’t seem to think it was possible for the great Damien Hirst to be so evidently talentless.

Well, I’ve never seen any evidence that he has ever had any talent. It’s just The Emperor’s New Clothes all over again.

Anyway. To shake off the Hirst mind numbingly boring experience, we decided to take a walk along the Water of Leith path which is just at the back of the Gallery.

We hadn’t been that way before and decided to turn left and took the path to Stockbridge rather than Balerno as we haven’t the foggiest notion of what there is to see at Balerno.

It was a really lovely day and it was quite busy down there what with joggers, walkers and cyclists. The water was really picturesque with great reflections of the autumnal trees.

I was surprised that there is so much housing along the way and some really great buildings, both modern, old and sort of repro. It must be a popular place to live as it is so rural but close to the city.

It wasn’t long before we were mounting the steps leading to Stockbridge which always seems to be quite villagey to me. It even has a traditional butcher shop and I can tell you that they are really thin on the ground in Scotland now – and I never thought I would find myself saying that. That’s Tesco for you.

There are nice independent shops like a cheesemonger as well. It’s just a pity that there are so many charity shops, although I shouldn’t really complain about that as we did buy quite a few books. Now we just have to find space for them, usual problem. It was nice to see that Scotmid has taken over the old Woolworths shop as I know that the local residents had a bit of a battle to stop one of the big supermarkets from taking it over. That would have killed off the whole area shop-wise.

So if you ever feel tempted towards capital punishment do yourself a favour and shun Princes Street for a nice slice of real Edinburgh life.