Hard on the heels of last week’s appalling news that standards of reading and science in Scotland’s schools are declining, we learn youngsters across the North-east are falling dramatically below expected levels of reading, writing, numeracy and listening and talking.

Parents in the area will be knocking on the doors of teachers wondering what kind of life their children are being prepared for.

Except, teachers are in short supply and those who are in place are so overwhelmed with work that many are seeking the exit door and searching for careers where the hassle factor is as low as the percentage of kids in Aberdeen who CAN write well.

Mind you, on that score I’m hardly surprised.

When I see classrooms on TV news programmes I’m horrified by the large numbers of children who haven’t been taught to hold their pencils in a way that’s conducive to legible writing.

However, if the Scottish Government continues to twiddle its fingers on this issue, we are not so much in for a crisis – we’re there already – but a catastrophe.

Will it worsen? You bet.

Education Secretary John Swinney doesn’t have the answer as he surveys a chaotic scene which will see our youngsters leaving school with inadequate skills.

With teachers leaving the profession in droves and potential new ones turning their backs on it, might we see drastic measures introduced?

A shorter school day? Parents requested to undertake basic home education?

Perhaps former and want-to-be part-time teachers paid to allow small groups of children to assemble in their living rooms for a few hours a week to be taught basic reading, writing and arithmetic?

Aberdeen is bottom of the class in various primary school age groups.

How much grub did Dons blackout waste?

The Northern Lights failed the Dons on Tuesday night as we were left in the dark for 20 minutes wondering whether their game against Motherwell would resume.

Maybe no-one had two bob for the meter.

But here’s the big question: with the game failing to reach half-time and the rush for the catering points, how many pies, hot dogs and those things laughingly described as burgers had to be ditched?

Warning over role as father of the bride

The day after tomorrow I will be in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

It’s there, beneath the ornate-vaulted ceilings of Chelsea Old Town Hall and its soaring marble columns and mahogany-panelled walls, that I will be on father-of-the-bride duty with the instructions of my daughter Kathryn still ringing in my ears: “Do not embarrass me.”

“Give me a microphone and put me in front of a crowd,” I reply, “and there are no guarantees.”