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Summer is over and as I left home for my day’s appointments earlier this week, I was treated to an eager procession of mums and youngsters on their way to Whitehills School. Even a three year-old was tagging on with her older sister. Strangely I saw no dads taking their share of the responsibility.

I remember my first day, not in August but in February. The snow was stacked up on the pavements. But the excitement was just the same and my memory still carries the experience 50 years later. And it was my dad who took me to school not mum.

For some unlucky pupils in West Lothian this week it was ‘no go’. Their PFI schools weren’t ready.

In Banff, the new primary school is very welcome, even if we will still be paying for it on the ‘never never’ when today’s five year-olds are married with their own youngsters.

But there are worrying suggestions that organisations are finding it more difficult to make bookings in the school. After all, under PFI, it is owned by a commercial company.

In England they obviously have a different climate – we have all seen their rain on TV have we not? And they are just getting accustomed to their holidays.

Londoners have dispersed to a’ the airts. Radio 4 comedy production teams are busily recording ‘Just a Minute’, ‘Dead Ringers’ and so on before Edinburgh audiences.

But there are traps for the unwary. Apparently a comedy skit based on a Barclays Bank advert fell very flat. We don’t see that ad and they didn’t realise it.

It is not just Radio 4 comedy on the road. On Monday a ‘World at One’ reporter was in Peterhead doing a piece on the Prison Campaign. And ‘The Economist’ has an article waiting for the announcement.

So given the fact that even the London media are tuning in to Peterhead Prison, it was astonishing that when Liberal-Democrat Justice Minister visited Aberdeen this week, he couldn’t tell us anything at all about the timetable for a decision.

It is beginning to be like getting on an NHS dentist’s list in Grampian. A lot of pain, a lengthy wait for relief, no solution in sight. Even our 16 year-old cats had their teeth sorted quickly last week, albeit expensively, in a few days from diagnosis.

But it is beginning to feel like pulling teeth getting action on prisons. Two and half years since the uncertainty started.

Our Prisons Minister had better get himself better briefed pretty quickly. Parliament will be back shortly and it doesn’t take much insight to know that the report on prisons published some six weeks ago by our justice committee will be the ‘talk of the steamie’.

Ministers who can’t get a grip of their civil servants are unlikely to be Ministers for long.