Cairndhu revisited

Broon's problems with Jinks in Cairndhu and Cluggie village, wishing to have it's name changed to Dalriada to give a proper impression of its community, are about to be reintroduced with the Spring weather. Miss Kirkwood is still there to help him with both. Maisie will keep him right as he tries to get his market garden venture off the ground but he is not entirely reconciled to his daughter's liaison
with Gillespie's son.

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Saving the Flower Show

Best in Show about a village flower show is now a paperback on Amazon. It is part nostalgia, part light reading and was written because I had so much enjoyment from making advisory visits with my father to flower show competitors as a youngster. My father had grown chrysanthemums for the Christmas market in the thirties, still grew but didn't show and was regarded as an expert. He took me round on his advisory visits when he encouraged competition by complements and fake news of other contestants. The book is set in Miss Kirkwood's village of Cairndhu where an international firm want to take over the show for advertising. Miss Kirkwood is against that and inspires her ex-pupil, John Brown, to resist. John Brown, or Broon as he is known in the village, has other priorities, mainly making sure his chrysanthemums beat George Gillespie's. Gillespie bribes judges with fillet steaks and legs of lamb, of course, so it is not plain sailing, especially when the weather misbehaves.

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I like dogs

I'm always amazed at how life turns up incidents that might find their way into a book about Cairndhu. I met someone who had been on holiday in Cornwall somewhere and the family were terrorised by a cockerel from the cottage next door. It reminded me of the occasion when a dog took a dislike to my bicycle. I tried all kinds of things from going down the other side of the road, to walking the bike  but that dog heard me no matter what. It even jumped over the fence when I tried full speed ahead. The same thing happened in Zambia when I had a motorbike, only that time it was a three legged dog and it jumped an eight foot high hedge and chased me down the street. I've searched for the pic I have of our last spaniel but he seems to have wandered off and I found this of my wife when we were at the launch of the South African Americas Cup yacht that I had forgotten about

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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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