Horses

When I was growing up, the farmer had a pair of horses for ploughing, harrowing, harvesting and pulling the cart. The milk was delivered by a kind of gig with big milk cans with taps on them to fill the jugs and bottles people left out. Nowadays they use machines that are three stories high to plough, machines that get stuck on narrow bridges and cause traffic jams. There are to be no diesel or petrol cars by some date I might not see but what of these monsters? They will need to trail a power station behind them and everything the cut will have to be used to generate the power. We face STARVATION unless we go back to a good pair of Clydesdales whose breath steams as they pull the plough on frosty mornings - I'm not going to spoil the picture by going into what noxious gasses they produce or what particulates they leave behind.

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Postman's Knock

 In Cairndhu, at Christmas, each Sunday School class had a party, where there were games like Postman's Knock and a thing called Be Baw Babity and The Farmer Wants a Wife, all of which needed a ring with someone inside. For the Farmer the person inside chose a wife then the wife chose someone to be the child and so on, until someone had to choose a dog. Choosing the first wife, if Tiptoes was there, was fixed - you got scalded with her look if you made a mistake and chose Jeany with the light brown hair. Several people were expected to contribute a party piece and Tiptoes recited Christopher Robin is saying his prayers in a VERY SWEET voice while we boys squirmed at a boy being portrayed in such a pansy fashion. There was also a girl who was taking elocution lessons and recited 'The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht wi' muckle fecht and din'. Why one needed to attend elocution classes to learn that, I never knew. I just hope the present day disco parties are as memorable as ours were.

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Kirk and Free Kirk

My boyhood friend, Rob, and I spent most of our free time together, except on Sunday. My family attended the Parish Church, The Church of Scotland, while his were members of the Free Church of Scotland. The differences between their theologies had long eroded but the antipathy remained. Our building had stained glass windows and a pipe organ and had been built from the stone recovered from the old kirk when it was vandalised at the time of the reformation. The old kirk had been on a low knoll that overlooked the old village but, by the time of the reformation, the village had grown away from it and it no longer dominated and the new kirk was built on a height that overlooked all but the 20^th century part of the village. I suppose the congregation’s first lesson of Sunday worship was that, like Moses, they had to climb up the hill to hear the word of God.

Rob’s kirk had no stained glass, that being a form of graven image, was down near the old kirk and had a small peddle organ, a modern introduction when the congregation was converted to singing hymns but not to the extent of having ‘a kist of whistles’.

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Raspberries

I bought some raspberries at the market on Friday - four punnets for £2. I told them I only wanted two but was told it would still be £2, so I took the four and gave two away. One of the recipients decided to get some cream and really enjoy the fruit, went home and poured the cream over the raspberries, still in the punnet. Of course the punnet, although plastic, had holes in it and the cream ran out as quick as he poured it in. It could have happened to me and it is that sort of daft episode I love to write about - just the kind of thing Broon from Cairndhu would do!
Talking of markets, my books were on special display last week and I had a T-shirt made specially for the occasion. Bees in my Bonnet, short stories, is on Amazon.

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