Laurens van der Post once wrote about an idiosyncratic elephant walking through the African bush. I may be wrong in this story  but I think it occurred in his book “A Walk with a White Bushman”. Whether or not it is true or not I have no idea but I like it and it seems that it could have happened, elephants being intelligent creatures.

The story goes that a herd of elephants were walking in line through the warm grassy undergrowth heading for the water hole, a cooling drink, a refreshing wash. One of their herd was not walking with them. Instead he was about 300 metres away, in sight but walking on a parallel path.  It seemed obvious to the onlooker that he was part of the herd but strange that he was apart from it. Van der Post speculated that he was practising a form of sanyasi.

Sanyassin is a form of stoicism from the Hindu religion which is characterised by a renunciation of material desires and prejudices. Those of you who are Hindu no doubt will have a far better and more detailed explanation than me (Answers on a post card please!). But, Dear Reader, forgive this dyed-in-the-wool atheist if he doesn’t purloin some of the useful aspects of religion for his own ends.  I like the elephant’s idea of stepping aside from society for a period of time in order to balance its perspective; remove the irritations of a crowded life; find therapy in alone-ness. I guess that the true sanyasi renounces for life, but, for me, I like the idea of a temporary retreat.  I see nothing stoical in stepping aside from society on a limited basis.  The true sanyasi makes it a lifestyle. And, of course, businesses, it is true, conduct retreats these days on many an occasion but that, Friends, is, I think, a smidge different.

I guess that I was unsuited for 5 years at boarding school . ‘The world was always too much with (me) late and soon”. The company of 80 boys at night and weekends was always there, I was frequently only there in body only. The throngs that make up any school day left little room for solitude.  To this day, Dear Reader, solitude is a balm and a luxury for me despite being so lucky and happy in the bosom of my wonderful wife and adult children.  Every so often I become the elephant who steps away from the herd, sees them at a distance, smiles at them from afar but wanders aimlessly and wonders dreamily in a world which is exclusively and selfishly mine. Such an absence of others gives back the presence of me, as Billy Connolly so wisely expressed it. It also gives the dust of my reminiscence time to settle.

I guess that in our spoilt western society mild forms of abstinence do occur. Ramadan and Lent are times when the religious amongst us give up something, the first being not eating during the daylight hours, (Don’t know how that works in the High Arctic in the summer?!) the second being sacrificing something one loves for 40 days. New Years’ Resolutions are another form of saying ‘No’ to a passion of ours. But for me, Dear Reader, stepping aside has never been an hardship. A selfish pleasure, yes, but never a sacrifice.

To lie on a grassy bank on the edge of a wood where the undergrowth is covered with bluebells; to look up at the tops of fir and silver birch and see them wafting and waving in a gentle breeze; to hear the tinkle of a gentle brook as it wends its way down a sloping valley;  to see and hear the rasp of purple heather as one walks across a moor on a windless day; to be alone in that experience is not a hardship but cotton-wool comfort, candy flossed cheer, afloat on a dreamlike ocean, cuddled on an imagined Cloud 9. I am so lucky, we are so lucky, to have the freedom to have that choice.

Imagine the soldier at the frontline in the Ukraine where every day threatens death from above, death from the front, death from behind. Imagine the noise of explosions which shatter and reverberate. Imagine the fear, the experience of coming to terms with the unimaginable; the terror which makes the abnormal normal. There death and disablement are an everyday occurrence. He or she does not have our choice.

Picture yourself as a child who should be skipping their way to a playground, the simple joy of the seesaw, the motion of the swing. See the smile on your mother’s face as she drops you at school and hands you the Tupperware that holds your lunch.  View  the excitement of learning as you hang on every word of your teacher as she hands you new challenges,  stimulates your inquisitiveness, piques your curiosity. Then the pick up at the end of the day, the walk home, the smiling question, the snack around the kitchen table, the warmth of your bedroom, the bedtime story, the hug and the lights out.  Then see yourself as the barefooted, muddied child, leaving your leaky shack with no lunch, no energy for a smile, no will for a skip. Then arrival at a mine where there is a narrow hole down which you must go to dig for the lithium which the rich need for their cell phones, where death is but a collapse away and the pay is a dollar a day and joy and childhood and education are things experienced in a country far, far away.

Become that girl shrouded but for the eyes, sitting on a cold floor in a religious school. Being taught about an afterlife rather than a daily one. To play is proscribed, to learn science, maths, literature, art, music are all banned and not for you. To fly a kite is to sin.  To do all that it is natural for a child to do is seen as anathema. All is a stone age mentality organised by primeval masculinity, male power, male fear. Such is the way in Taliban led Afghanistan. (Just read an UNESCO report on this).

In these three terrible scenarios there is no luxuriant lavender, no gentle baying of sheep, no bovine bellows, no stream meandering its sparkling way, no wind rustling the treetops.  The world is a place of doom, gloom, hopelessness, never ending grind, perpetual fear, joyless, jeopardised and dire. All is a dread drudge. It is in the words of Hobbes, when talking of life, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. So yes, Friends, you and I can find our sweet spots far from the madding crowd. We can recreate through the power of the natural world. We can step back so that when it comes time to rejoin our family, friends and colleagues we can step in with renewed energy, wiser choices, more careful and considered thoughts. We can be kinder to our fellows.

So when the driver in front fails to indicate; when the coffee we have just bought is a wee bit off; when there have been days of rain; when the phone tells us that ‘your call is important to us’; when the idiot in chief tells us that we are to blame for everything ; that the Danes, the Iranians, the rest of the world, the Panamanians, the Canadians are nought but a conniving bunch of free-loaders . It is then, Dear Reader, that we need to stroll away from the herd and look from a distance. The microscope brings us too close, the telescope is too far away. But the middle ground, Friends, is bonhomie, a grin, a good word, an easing gesture, a ready acceptance. Our middle ground may be perceived as weakness by some, by those who brag, those who never admit wrongdoing in themselves but always see it in others.  Those are strongest who quietly do, those who humanely are.

“How strange that the grass is all that remains standing after the storm”, said the boy.

“Sometimes being soft is strong,” said the rabbit.

‘The Velveteen Rabbit” by Marjory Williams.

If you have taken time to read my ramblings, Friends, the chances are that you are one of those people who is a blade of grass which is still standing after the storm. More power to ye!

Thanks for reading.

(Being a follow up from “Muskrat and the Trumpeter Swan” published January 15^th, 2025)

The river which had flowed so purely for hundreds of years was suffering a change. Since time immemorial, animals had found their way to the pure, cool waters to drink and bathe and recreate. The lilies had floated on the surface, the reeds had rooted beneath and had bent gently to the flow in the summer and had flattened on the surface when the annual thaw made the waters burst  forth . For eons the waters had flowed yet stayed the same. But now there were things stirring both on the surface and beneath. The animals were beginning to notice, starting to be alarmed and wishing for the constant that was now inconstant. Trumpeter Swan and his friend, Elon the Muskrat, had somehow slipped into power, elongating their importance on a long piece of elastic which was starting to fray. Trotsky the turbulent turtle had warned with a pithy saying,

“You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you.”

But then Trotsky was slow moving, He always arrived at Trumpeter rallies later than everybody else. And then he would drone on about the proletariat and the Mensheviks . Nobody listened to him because he stunned and bored with jaw yawning tediousness. His logic was irrefutable but bound for the wilderness of distanced glazed eyesight.

 By this time the swans were in a fervour of nodding agreement as the orange revolution pulled them along with unreasoned inanity. The frogs croaked in support from their lily pads, the fish came close to the surface to be a part of the whole. And Trumpeter talked and talked with passionate antagonism. Well established as leader of the river now, he believed that it did not matter what he said but that if he said it, it was true and if, at least it sounded  nonsensical, it kept him as the centre of attention which, of course, was the all important point.

 Elon the Muskrat realised early on that the Trumpeter was not very bright but that he was extremely cunning. He could be flattered, he could be manipulated, he could be a source to add to the Muskrat’s wealth and power. The early signs of Trumpeter’s cunning came front and centre  when he realised that he could not possibly fulfil his promises to make the river great again.  For years he had dismissed the idea of global warming but now the Spring floods were excessive and, worse, the river looked like drying up every summer. The trumpeter and the muskrat were living in a climate of extremes. Hmm, there’s a surprise.  Trumpeter needed a distraction and he found many abroad. He played the blame game extremely well. It quickly became the fault of the riverbank that things were not right in the river. No residents of the river were ever at fault, instead the rest of the world was out to get them. They must be punished and punished they would be. The rest of the world, in its innocence, did not know that ‘they were out to get them’. But parallel universes, they were coming to realise, were like that!  Trumpeter loved the fact that the Muskrat had somehow slipped in a Nazi salute into one of his smiling moments.  He had used that to label the good of the world as bad and the bad of the world as good.

On the river the animals had started to notice that the circle and balance of nature was changing. The frogs became alive to the fact that there were not the flies available for nourishment. The swans noted that the vegetation for nest building was not as prevalent as it once was. The fish, who used to rest in slow moving pools near the riverbank, were finding that they were no longer there.  The residents of the riverbank, Muskrat’s real domain, found themselves as pariahs, no longer welcome on the river.  The natural world was being exploited and controlled and changed and driven towards destruction. The deer and raccoons who occasionally appeared on the side of the river and had long warned against electing the trumpeter, no longer muttered “I told you so” sotto voce. They now smiled cynically and looked down their noses with growing disdain when gobblydygook floated its way to the surface, a muddy morass of slime and sludge where once had poured the clear waters of truth, honesty and good intentions.  The river was slipping away from its natural purity and suffocating in trumpeter’s triumphalism. Like all symptoms he fed on himself. The green sludge was becoming stinking slime, the estuary was settling into a barren waste.

The Trumpeter did not like animals that were weak. He despised the frolicking frivolity of the otters; he sneered at the jumping joy of the salmon;  he chuckled at the lumbering aloofness of the grizzly bears; he saw the eagles as errand boys but had jealous envy at their filmstar looks. Meanwhile he occasionally had the muskrat speak to the masses even though he looked uneasily on from his nest, not because he disagreed with what he was saying, but because more and more he was stealing the show.

In the far north in the high arctic strange things were happening. An ice floe was noted floating towards Hudson’s Bay on the Beaufort Sea. A polar bear was sat on his back on the ice and next to him was a seal.  Prey and predator seemed to be conversing in a manner unbecoming to their hunter and hunted instincts.

“Soooo, let’s get this straight Muskrat and Trumpeter are calling us the 51^st state. They are calling our prime minister the ‘governor’. You and I need to set aside our differences and unite for the fight.”

The seal nodded wisely at the words of the polar bear.

“What shall you eat?” The seal said sympathetically.

The polar bear scratched his head.

“Hmm. Good point. I’ll find a way. “

Further south a female moose stood in the shallows of a lake. She munched peacefully on the greenery and her chewing was a mellifluous mulling. She knew that she was so ugly that Trumpeter and the Muskrat would have nothing to do with her.  They would not listen to what she had to say because they only respected the façade. Deep seated interiors, niches of noteworthy knowledge had no interest to them because these qualities were not ‘good television’. As she chewed she resolved to embrace the difficulty. She mulled silently, ruminated ruefully. She would act but not yet.

Rumours had started to circulate that a force from the east was starting to make its presence felt.  Putin the putrid panther had arrived off the coast and somehow floated ashore with his rich cronies. Areas of the riverbank previously innocuous now boasted a host of minatory morons who looked on the river with envy and malice aforethought.  Putin with padding putrefaction was starting to encourage his off-siders to encroach; beginning to suggest that the long established inhabitants of the river were responsible for all the ills and wrongs of his own land. He arranged to talk to Trumpeter. When they finally met, Trumpeter came out of the meeting pale and subdued, an incredible achievement considering his overall orangeness.

Putin slowly edged his many followers off the riverbank and into the river. At first the river dwellers said and did nothing. They went about their business as they always had done; they walked their neighbourhoods as they always had; their young played in the pools and on the little islands as was their wont. Then one day the panther ordered his cubs to move into the lairs of the cygnets and to ship the cygnets onto the riverbank without telling their parents where they were going.  The local swans were now told that they could not swim near the bank unless they agreed to swear to the panther creed. One of the swans would not do this and somehow disappeared.  Trumpeter Swan meanwhile did nothing to help his friends who were losing their homes and their food supply. Indeed he was openly siding with the panther pantheon. 20% of his land had disappeared behind a dam that was proving difficult to breech. Trumpeter was now promoting the message that Putin was correct; that the areas of the river that were being colonised were not worth fighting for; that the animals who lived there were disloyal to him anyway; he was better off without them. He breathed a sigh of relief when small islands at the east end of the river were now in the hands of his new ally, Putin. He reasoned that the islands and peninsulas called New York, Boston, Nantucket, New Jersey, Atlantic City were nothing but a thorn in his side. He and his movement were better off without freedom of the press, contrary ideas and intelligent individualism. Putin could have his 20% and he would hang onto the 80% where his following was greatest.

Meanwhile in the north, differences were being set aside. The moose was sharpening her antlers, the beavers were busy building dams; those creatures famed for their solitary outlooks such as the loons were haunting the lakes with their many messages. The geese were venturing south over the border and defecating with effluential  glee on Trumpeter’s swans. The wolves were mustering and howling their resistance and wandering over the border and frightening the sheep.  Barriers were being broken down, utopian ideals were being set aside and  realpolitik realised. Every Canadian sunrise brought a dawn of new activity, complacency was dead throughout the land, post-nationalism as an ideal was little more than a smoking ember on a fire that the Trumpeter had lit.

The trumpeter and the muskrat became closer and closer.  They fed off each other. They set themselves adrift on a mythical sea of ‘truths’; they fed on the troubles of others making them worse with malicious intent; they found the lowest common denominators of society and embraced them as their own. They loved gaudiness and gold and god. But as they floated on their fantastical flotsam, it suddenly became clear that the rest of the world was passing them by. The attention which was all that they really desired was being diverted elsewhere.  Sense, worth and goodness were starting to reassert themselves. The waters of the river urged them out to sea and it was there that they found themselves alone, unwanted, useless. The other animals had recognised their foolish rush of blood and learned that the best way to absolve themselves was to let the river wash their sins and embarrassment out to sea.

Dear Reader, this rather clumsy attempt at a parody does little to mitigate and ameliorate the anger and irritation that many of us feel towards the governor of the United States and his rich oligarchs and sycophantic acolytes. You will note that I have not dragged President Zelensky into this ditty. This is deliberate. It is not within me to tease a man of his courage, his patriotism, his morality, his humility and his grit and determination, I am not worthy of such a task.  To write about him in almost the same breath as I write about the boorish, the genocidal, the paranoid, the psychopathic, the brazen selfish egotism, the terrible manners, the gangsterish manipulation, the nonsensical stupidity, the utter lies and the blatant extortion emanating from trump and his weasels, is to add insult to injury. To write about Volodymyr Zelensky in the same context as that inhumanity is to insult a human being who is the bravest of the brave.

Slava Ukraine.

The flight from Vancouver was short. The children and the staff were excited. Collingwood School was headed north to witness the Inuit Games. Traditional Inuit sports which brought in teams from the 11 or so regions of the High Arctic. None of us knew what to expect. Sara* the teacher had a contact who had helped to organise the event. She had seized the moment and kindly invited Pete and Richelle, her colleagues, to join her. We both jumped at the chance.  On arrival in Whitehorse we were to be bussed to an Outdoor Centre. It was February so temperatures were low although not as low as they could have been,

We were off the main road and winding a narrow trail to the centre. It seemed to be slow progress because we were not in Vancouver. We discovered that time and tide were different in the cold beyond. (Actually, Dear Reader, one needs an ocean for tide and there wasn’t one!)The students were young, 9 year olds and up. We arrived at the centre and met in the large building which housed the dining room and the recreational facility. We were met by a lady in late middle age. She quietly exuded warmth and welcome. She was delightfully calm and understated. I was grateful for the lack of energetic effusiveness.  We were shown the cabins in which we were to sleep. I was slightly perturbed with the pot belly stove in the middle of the boys’ cabin. I had images of children stumbling about and burning themselves .  I resolved to sleep next to the stove to prevent accidents. I also decided that when the boys were sent to bed then I would go to bed at the same time.  No way was I going to leave young boys unsupervised when there was a lit fire in the cabin.  

On the first night we had established that the washing facilities and toilets were about 200 yards from our cabin. The temperature dropped. At about 9.00 p.m. the boys and I left the girls in the rec room and trekked off to get ready for bed. All ablutions were complete. The children were in their bunks, in their sleeping bags. The lights were off and stories were being told. I was stretched by the stove, warmed by its heat, comfortable in its glow, listening to the chat.

“Excuse me, Mr. Davidson, I need the washroom.”

“No problem, just put a coat and boots on and pop around the outside of the cabin, do what you need and dash back in”.

Silence. 30 seconds pass. There is no movement from the wee lad who needs a wee.

“Excuse me, Mr. Davidson.”  The same polite voice from the dark.

“Yes. I thought you needed a pee.”

Silence.

“Excuse me, Mr. Davidson (hesitation), it is of the #2 variety”.

It took me a few seconds to understand what ‘the #2 variety’ was. Inward cursing. Head torch on, Rummaging for socks, hat and gloves, snow pants, winter coat.

“I have to come with you. Wrap up warm”.

So we left the cosiness, walked out into the chilliness, shivered the short distance to the washroom. I waited, my irritation abated, I chuckled at the ‘#2 variety” and knew that that would stay with me as a memory.

Before breakfast on the following morning, we ventured down to the lake with the children. A previous group had built snow shelters on the icy surface. The children played as children do. We were to go dog-sledding after breakfast. The meal was over and we went back to the lake to await the arrival of the sleds. We were scheduled for a time but we had forgotten that time was different up here. Eventually we heard snow mobiles and the barking of the dogs. And they were there. A husband and wife team and sleds. There is nothing like a canine invasion to excite children more. What an experience! Suddenly I thought of the verse of Robert Service and the poetic  picture he painted of the vast unpopulated wilderness of the Arctic. We were not long enough on the sleds but I was conscious of wanting to see what was round that next corner, explore this arboreal island, the wish to move onward for ever and up. But it was a wonderful  taster, Dear Friends . Added to that we had come to see the competition and experience the culture of the Inuit peoples. It was a trip to the far North which many people never experience. It was wonderful for me as an adult and I hope, Friends, the memory is still with the children who experienced it.

I was thinking about this amazing trip the other day when I was trekking down memory lane with some ex-colleagues.  Long back burner memories came to the fore, uncalled for but not unwelcome. For example, I remembered, the young mother requesting an urgent meeting with me after school. As with all such events I immediately went to the dark place which assumed I had done wrong although I did not know what. We all know, Friends, the lurking gloom at work when the untoward meeting appears from the distant unknown. The ‘terra incognita’ destined to darken our day. There was some trepidation when 4.00 p.m. arrived.  The mum arrived looking worried and concerned.

“What can I do for you?” I tried my most ingratiating smile always a risk because the Davidson physiognomy  often musters the opposite of what is intended, poison coming to supper.

“Sometimes at night when he is asleep, I stand at his open bedroom door and for about 15 minutes I cannot take my eyes away from the beauty and innocence of my sleeping boy. I don’t think I should do that. What do you think, Mr. Davidson?”

I tried not to look confused. I tried to find the words.  Eventually.

“Mrs. ——–,  what’s the problem with that?” Another ghastly smile from Davidson

Of course it was what she had wanted to hear. Her smile showed relief and validation.  After she had gone, I was still confused  but, of course, relieved.

One afternoon many years ago, Dear Friends, I lost a 9 year old. I thought I had dismissed my class properly at the end of the day. Bus, daycare or parent pick up seemed to have gone smoothly. But  suddenly I was faced with a mother who was upset and panic stricken. I was having visions of an end to my career but could not understand what had happened. After searching the school to no avail, contacting the bus company, parents who were family friends, it was discovered that ‘Colin’ was at home. Mum and I were both relieved. We both sat down with him the following day. We discovered that he had decided to assert his independence by walking home.  I became teacherish and preachy and lectured him in mum’s presence about health and safety and such like. After he had left the room and I had stabled my high horse, Mum was still, I could see, upset but I could now sense that she was more angry with him than me.

“Hmmm, I see, Huckleberry Finn is alive and well and living in West Vancouver.”

I thought as I was blurting that this might not be received well but she laughed in relief and went out of the door to pick up ‘Huck” and take him home.

I am always amazed, Dear Reader, about how events long gone can suddenly come into view again, snowdrops after a long winter. I remembered these events out of the blue because of a conversation that I was having with a friend.  I had forgotten their existence.

Like all of you and often me, pulled along on the dog sled of life, wanting to see around the corner of the next frozen bay, I want to somehow understand how and why suddenly a blast from the past suddenly comes upon us, a memory that we had forgotten.  There are many mysterious ‘motes troubling the mind’s eye’ and that, Dear Friends, is the somewhat tenuous way in which I can justify the title of this blog! I leave you with Robert Service:-

“Thank God! There is always a Land of Beyond

For us who are true to the trail;

A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,

A farness that never will fail.”                          The Land of Beyond.

Thanks for reading.

*Thank you Sara, for including me in this trip. It was one of the highlights of my 20+ years at Collingwood School.

I left school in 1970 at the age of 18. I first set foot into the real world with a façade of confidence, five years at boarding school having taught me how to conceal the real me. Through a variety of connections and youthful laziness, I managed to find a job as an hotel porter in the village of Aviemore, an outdoor resort in the Highlands of Scotland. The staff accommodation was excellent so it felt like I was back at boarding school. But the work force was far different from anything I had experienced before.  Most of them were from Glasgow. They were definitely working class and had found it difficult to find work in their native city. The combination of alcohol and close living quarters often led to altercations of a physical variety, most of which I avoided.

In contrast the man who ran the stores was an upper class middle aged Cornishman called Arthur Trevenna.  He seemed to be an anachronism in the hard bitten  toughness of much of the workforce. One would have thought that this Englishman with the crystal glass accent  would be roundly despised and mocked by his workmates. But Arthur had a way about him.  Certainly he could walk with kings but he could talk with everybody.  He was blessed with twinkling eyes and a  weary wisdom. We all warmed to Arthur and, frequently he became our father confessor, our imparter of practical wisdom. I should mention here, Dear Reader, that Arthur had been a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. I knew little of this precursor to World War II at the time but have since learned through reading George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway what a nasty little war it was.

Life at the hotel was fun. Carrying guests luggage up to their rooms,  sticking Archie in the sauna because he had overindulged on his tips; helping Colin Campbell load his musical instruments and sound system back into the elevator because he had unloaded them on the 10^th floor rather than the first. All the floors looked the same. Being offered 3 pounds 40 pence per day on my days off to clear snow off the road to the ski hill on Cairngorm .  It was good to be young and healthy but, Dear Reader, I was so, so  naïve that the worldly wise exploited my innocence with merciless mendacity

“You’re a pheasant plucker, Davidson.”

I was sat in a group in the staff dining room in the bowels of the hotel. I did not know how to react to this statement but, I felt, that in such company I should at least show that I was able to stand up for myself. I foolishly mounted my high horse, I took offence. Arthur had voiced this statement with his usual twinkle and his inkling of a smile. I took all by surprise by becoming red in the face, standing up and storming out of the lunch room. Well I sort of made a stand, Dear Reader, but hardly a glorious exit  The quizzical looks of the group followed me on my way. Eventually laughter broke out as I exited. I spent the rest of the day inwardly upset and thinking how I should respond to this slur on my character, this verbal act of bullying.

A young long-haired fellow was in charge of the hotel plate wash. His name was Sinclair. I warmed to him. When I walked through the kitchens he would often be found chin on elbow resting on the metal work top waiting for the current batch of dishes to finish its cycle in his pal, Hobart. Hobart being the brand name of the  dishwasher.

“Ye niver can hurry Hobart, laddie.”

I was always ‘laddie’ to him despite our closeness in age. I would always acknowledge him when I passed   He would respond with a variety of incomprehensible grunted greetings, each of them unique.

“Correach aye, laddie”.

Working in the plate wash was neither challenging nor interesting, I guess that ‘Sinkie’ had to make his own entertainment.  Over a pint one night I asked him how he had found a job in the Strathspey Hotel plate wash being as he was from some obscure corner of South-Western Argyllshire.

“Where else would ‘Sinkie’ Sinclair work, laddie?”

Amidst laughter from the gathering in the pub. I did not understand. I was a great deal slower in those days. A further example of Davidson missing the point. Hiding Archie in the sauna because he was too drunk to work was a plan to save Archie’s job but we who conceived it did not realise that we could have seen Archie off from something far worse than his job. Drunk man in the sauna, quick dehydration, sleeping in excessive temperatures could have resulted in Archie’s demise.  Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it, mes amis?

Dear Friends, I was used to living with others through my school experience. But my upbringing had been comfortably middle class. I had mixed with the rich and famous. Two actors sons, in the shape of Michael Wilding and Nick Hawkins. A royal from the kingdom of Brunei.  Sammy Ashamu, son of a Nigerian magnate.  And here I was with a variety of characters from some of the rougher estates of Glasgow. I don’t know whether or not I was a snob then. I do know that my every day was filled with uncertainty. How would they feel about this spoilt rich boy working with them? I need not have worried. I was accepted very quickly.

After about a day or so of angst, wondering how I would handle Arthur’s slur on my character, he called me over to join him for lunch. He looked me in the eye.

“We’re all laughing at you, Peter.”

I must have reddened again. He chuckled.

“What do you think, a pheasant plucker is?”

“Something not very nice,” I muttered.

“Oh Dear, Oh Dear. JJ come over here and explain it to the laddie.”

John Jordan one of the hotel waiters came over.

“Arthur called you a pleasant f _ _ _ er.”

And that, Dear Reader, was what might be called, if not a ‘teaching moment’ then certainly a learning  one.

Like many independent schools, Collingwood hosts an annual Spring Fair as a fund raiser. It is a fun-filled joyous occasion. (Well, as I write this, I have the memory of the sickly taste of whipped cream about my features because young children used to pay money to put a plate of whipped cream in my face, so, Dear Reader, it is fair to say that writing ‘joyous’ caused a frantic twitching of my  eye tic.) The dunk in the water tank, Dear Reader, was a far better deal. Well marginally. What do you think, Lisa Evans?

The parent body is multi-cultural so the food for sale is magnificent. I always walked through the woods from the Cleveland Dam not wishing the chaos of parking at the school. I brought an empty day pack with me because I knew that I was going to buy food for our evening meal at home. Truth be told, like most of my life, I was only in it for the food. Herewith endeth the introduction.

In one particular academic year I had a keen and enthusiastic mother in my class. Actually I had many such characters on my daily round. They were sort of intimidating because I didn’t effervesce to match their fizz.  My enthusiasm was there but at a deep seated cavernous depth, a sort of abyss of lurking demonstrativeness whereas theirs was all bounce and bubbles, a surface of excitement.  I had one mum who took energy to a new exhausting level. She was into everything Collingwood, a gem of a volunteer, probably wanted by every politician vying for power,  certainly needed  by every advertising agency striving for sales.  I remember her with tired affection, glad for her presence, feigning disappointment at her absence. She had a heart of gold, her generosity of time and spirit permeated the hallways of the school, molten lava down a mountain side. Were there no bounds to her eagerness, Dear Friends?

 I remember flinching one morning when she walked towards me down the hallway flanked by three other formidables. Friendly wave from a cohort of intimidation.

“Mr. Davidson, Mr. Davidson, a quick word.”

Every exit escape route blocked off. No point in pretending I was late for somewhere else. Bite lip, force friendliness, glib welcome.

“We are having a parent coffee morning. Anything you would like us to bring up?”

“Not offhand but I’ll think of something”.

Feeling of dread, a parent coffee morning could ruin my whole week. Nothing I wanted less, Dear Friends, than a raft of new ideas, innovation snapping at the heels of the Davidson equanimity, my life-jacket of peace hopeless on a vast ocean of well-intentioned seas.

“And another thing, no more sad novels.”  Four waving of fingers, shaking of heads.

I was reading ‘Shiloh’ with my class, a heart-rending dog story about a mistreated beagle.

“It has a happy ending,” I pleaded pathetically.

Walking through the door that night after work, Irene had laid out about 10 of my old rugby jerseys which she had decided were to be donated to the used clothing section of the Spring Fair. I was to deliver them to the senior campus in the morning on my way to the junior school where I worked. She never wanted to see them again.  We all know, Dear Friends, the lie of the land when our partner in life decides on a purge. I was to be rid of that which was second most dear to me, my rugby jerseys, on the instructions of she who was and is most dear to me. I searched for ‘buts’ with which to rebut but I could see the look that brooked no but-ing of buts. My rugby jerseys were doomed.  An unstoppable force of nature had spoken. I dropped them  off for the fair.

As a favour to staff and select parents such as those who helped organise the event of which Mrs. High-Energy in my class was one, on the Thursday before the Saturday we were allowed a preliminary visit during which we could purchase that which we wished. Wonderful for Collingwood teachers with young children to clothe, methought, but Davidson in a clothing store? More likely to find a polar bear in a sauna.  We were allowed in before the ‘great unwashed’ arrived on the Saturday. I could never be a part of the ‘great unwashed’ Dear Reader, because I was often in the dunk tank.  (Ha! A puerile joke from the woeful wit that is Davidson!)

The Spring Fair, as ever, was uplifting. I left with a smile on my face, a bounce in my step and drooling with anticipation at the mealtime goodies in my backpack. I had showered off the chill waters of the dunk tank or soaked the whipped cream from my face. I can’t remember which particular of those two traumas I had experienced that year. The curry and rice mingled with the forest fragrances as I walked down through the woods. Dogs sniffed the air as I passed.

Monday morning came. I always arrived at school early. As usual Viktor and the maintenance department had opened up. One of my early morning pleasures was my brief chat with Viktor before the day began. I was surprised, however, when some 20 minutes before the main bulk of children arrived, the aforementioned  enthusiastic mother was knocking at the door of the classroom. She had done so much to help with the Spring Fair that I thought she would be heavily involved in counting the takings or a dawn debrief with her Parent Council cronies over a cuppa Jo. But there she was in my classroom with her child in tow. I congratulated her on the success of the event and all the hard work she had put in. But she could not contain herself she was on to other things. She had a large kit bag in front of her. She was keen to show me its contents.

“Mr. Davidson, Joanna and I have something for you..”

She unzipped the bag with a flourish.

“I saw these at the Fair. I thought to myself, “I know just the person who would appreciate them.” We bought them for you. They’re XXL so we know they will fit.”

(Beaming smiles from mother and child)

“Ta-da”.”

And there, in all their wear worn splendour, Dear Friends, were my tattered old rugby jerseys.

Thanks for reading.

A few years back I blundered into a local coffee shop and before I could think about ordering, the young barista asked me, out of the blue, what I would do if I won the lotto. We had never met so I was somewhat confounded by the question but not so confused that an answer  did not spring from some cobwebbed corner of the Davidson mind,.

“I wouldn’t want to win the lotto because it would change my life.”

I didn’t really know where that came from but the young woman was nonplussed by my answer. I was thinking, Dear Reader, about this incident when I was out for a walk the other day. I suppose it sort of came about because I was pondering the amount of money people were prepared to shell out for the Taylor Swift experience.

As I have said frequently in my blog posts, I have lead a pretty happy go lucky existence over my life. So what would I want if all of a sudden millions of dollars landed in my lap? I know more about what I would not want.

Irene and I have lived in our house in Norgate Park here in North Vancouver since 1991. I would not want to leave it for somewhere else.  I love the niches and nooks around the house, the cosiness of my reading chair, the back garden. In many ways it is a dishevelled old house; it is dry inside but there are bits that have seen better days. So what! I too have seen better days but would not exchange every wrinkle on my brow; every groan when I make an effort to stand; nor my arthritic right knee; not the tic in my left eye. Every one of these wee ailments represents something I have done in my youth, something which I do not regret whether or no it went wrong or right. I feel , probably wrongly, that I have worked  hard for every wrinkle, every wince, every stress that has contributed to what I am today. The house too has worked hard, we who live here respect its wrinkles. We and the house have grown old together.

Our Mazda 3 vehicle we bought as new in 2009 and it still runs as it did 15 years ago. It gets us from A to B locally and I am confident it would get us from A to Z if we decided to barrel off into the wild blue yonder aka the Coq. Irene and I frequently pop back to the UK for visits to meet with family.  It is an expense but it doesn’t break the bank. We stay in the cheapest accommodation available and none comes cheaper than when we stay with family. Neither of us needs to pay a lot of money to put our heads on a pillow and sleep. I can sleep leaning against a wall if the time is right.  We are not sun seekers.  The weather  is an irrelevant aside.  But, don’t get me wrong, I do have an hankering to visit interesting places and feel  the nuances of different cultures.  But we can already afford that, we don’t need a sudden blizzard of money to reach that particular goal.

However I have heard the argument about the good we could do if we had a lot of money. A charitable legacy to a worthy cause is indeed laudable. We do donate to charities close to our hearts already but obviously our enough is never enough and our enough if we were able to contribute more would also not be enough.  We have two adult children who work very hard in their professional lives,  they are well paid yet struggle to pay the rent every week. One of them really has no alternative but to live in his parents’ house and pay us rent. It is fine to have him here, really no problem at all but the fact that a good wage earner is priced out of the housing market, rental or otherwise, does not bode well for the health and wealth of the area or, indeed the country.  Would we like to give lotto winnings to our adult children? The answer to that is that of course we would.

I don’t really know where I am going with this, Dear Reader, My blurting to the barista was in response to her left field question. But in my heart of hearts, in W.B. Yeats’ “deep hearts core”, I have probably embraced the struggle. Whenever things have been difficult or things have gone awry and I have moaned and complained and whimpered and wimped my way through professional or personal crises, I have come through the other side, puffed out my cheeks, taken a deep breath. If I have not thought that the experience was fun then I feel still strong enough to stick my head above the parapet for the inevitable next time. I know that the ‘next time’ will not be a visitation from a long lost friend but, in the words of Michael Caine, I will feel equipped to ‘embrace the difficulty’. Not for the first time will I notice that the Greek word for ‘crisis’ also has the nuance of ‘opportunity’. If I have to gain another wrinkle in the process hopefully I can regard such as nothing more than an honourable notch to my gun. And what we all know, Dear Friends, is that there will be a next time even if we suddenly have loads of money.  “All that glisters is not gold’ as the poet would say. As J. P. Cavalluzzo used to tell the children during his time as an Head at the junior school at Collingwood School, “Character is destiny”.

I am not against betting. I used to bet on an horse at the Grand National every year in the UK. I have bet on Scotland to win the 6 Nations rugby championship, a forlorn hope indeed. Irene and I will occasionally buy a lotto ticket and I cross my fingers in the process in the wish that we should never win it, a wish that has been happily fulfilled so far.

So what is my point? I am not a stoic. I don’t think I am a prude. I embrace all kinds of wee peccadilloes.  I am very happy to cavort my way into the odd sin or two.  But, Dear Friends, sloshing along on a rainy walk with millions of dollars in my pocket would be a burden too far. I would likely be wracked with guilt for having it in the first place. I would unburden myself of it amongst local and international charities.  I would pay a visit to my local bookshop. I would despatch Irene to our local spa treatment centre. But, Dear Friends, it would be a burden. It would not relieve me of worries. It would, no doubt, make me lazier than I already am.  It would have me pontificating louder than usual and, believe me, nobody I know wants that.  The idea of Peter Davidson Elon Musking his wealth as an arrogant gung holiness produces a shiver down my spine and a good reason for anybody walking  towards  me suddenly to give a body swerve in a different direction.  

 Dear Reader, as we all know, riches do not begat happiness.

Thanks for reading.

The river and the riverbank needed each other. Without the bank there would be an inundation and a lake, without the river there would be no wet and an arid desert.  They were two different worlds but, of necessity, linked.  The tadpoles, the frogs, the ducks and the swans made the river their own. In the holes on the bank lived the voles, the rats, the otters and the occasional muskrat. Each went about their business and, of necessity, the twain ever met. The river was a calm, gentle, meander until the rains rushed and the cascades cavorted.  The banks were a haven of holes, a mine of dungeon darkness but with pathways and order, nests and homes, protected from the river but needy of what it offered.

This particular river was a happy place. The wildlife realised its place in the circle of things. It provided and was provided for. It was balanced and at peace. But, of late, there had come unusual ripples, eddying disturbances. The majestic swans who glided effortlessly with peaceful pride through bulrush and reed, through still waters and rough were noticing something untoward amongst their number. The trumpeter swan who had always lurked on the edge of popularity, was now more frequently paddling intrusively into the equanimity of his peers .He was becoming an unwanted incursion. As he aged he was becoming more and more aggressive, not only that, but his beautiful white complexion was ripening into orange.  There were whisperings on the river that he was stirring things up in a less than subtle manner.  For example, he thought there were too many salmon appearing during the spawning season and thought that they were useless anyway because all they did was give birth and die. He wanted to ‘drain them  from the swamp’ as he so crassly put it. On the other hand, he didn’t like that the eagles were swooping from nowhere and taking ‘our’ fish and ‘our’ frogs. He particularly didn’t like the fact that the neighbours who lived in the river bank were ever more frequently encroaching on our river and stealing our jobs and bringing in their diseases and eating our  young. He rallied together a group of his fellow swans and riled them into a frenzy so that they agreed that they ought to build a dam between them and the bank. “Y’all need a wall” was his catchy slogan.

Meanwhile in the bank Muskrat was burrowing and talking and raising banners and putting forth ideas. He had ruled the tunnels, the enclaves, the niches and the nooks ever since his grain supply had far outreached, by many billions, any storage that any other creature could hope to attain. He watched Trumpeter Swan from afar and saw in which direction things were going. He knew that as a native of the river bank he could never be a ruler of the river because foreign born rodents could not rule in such an environment. But he thought he could  influence and edge his way into some sort of power . Muskrat arranged to meet Trumpeter Swan.

Muskrat was invited to Trumpeter’s nest, a luxurious waterfront property in some reeds to the west of the river. It was named ‘Far-il-legal’.  Muskrat set off early one morning to swim the short distance.  He was a little bit annoyed that Trumpeter was not there to greet him but, it was explained, that he was attending a flock of swans and that, as he had elected himself their leader, it behoved him to stay as long as possible. The reason he gave was  that they could not get enough of his orange tainted oratory.  When eventually he did arrive, Trumpeter gave Muskrat the gift of a baseball cap on which was written, “Make our river great again’. Muskrat put on his MORGA hat, not because he wanted to but because he was in the throes of ingratiation.  Trumpeter talked non-stop about his plans for the river and, indeed, the riverbank, none of which made any sense to Muskrat. But he didn’t care about that, his two interests being power and wealth. Muskrat was wise and diplomatic enough to share only his plans to increase his wealth . He sensed that Trumpeter possessed one real attribute and that was an huge ego, a vast acreage of me, myself and I which he had spent years cultivating, a garden of me-den. His animal cunning, ‘cos he was an animal after all, knew that if he moved in on Trumpeter’s sense of entitled power he would be sent packing.  Accordingly he flattered Trumpeter when he spoke of taking over the local farmland, fawned when he spoke of buying up the distant forests and tried a smile when he pontificated  about making the riverbank the 51^st state.  He grinned and nodded, smooched and blarneyed, watched and waited.  Trumpeter’s trust for him grew.

At one well attended rally, Trumpeter asked Muskrat to speak. It was a hot sunny day so Muskrat offered any Trumpeter supporter free run of the cool riverbank tunnels and a limited access to his grain supply. Several cygnets, their necks with a strange red hue, not yet educated in the ways of the world or, indeed, in the ways of anything else, jumped at the chance. They swore an oath to the Trumpeter and were escorted by some of Muskrat’s minions over to the riverbank.

Time moved quickly and before long Trumpeter found himself undisputed leader of the river. Muskrat was able, with subtlety, to delay the building of the wall. He moved freely amongst his own kind and more and more he mingled with the inhabitants of the river. There he proceeded to influence with a quiet word here and an underhand bribe there.  Over a period of about a year, the river dwellers became slowly disillusioned with Trumpeter’s proclamations; slowly realised that Trumpeter’s truth was a holiday home visited infrequently ; that Trumpeter’s reality was a miasma of meanderings with a lost horizon beyond which lay a confusion of unknowns. They started to seek out Muskrat for a solution to their problems, for logical pragmatism. Gradually Trumpeter found himself being ruler in name only. He found that he could certainly promise the grandiose but that he could only deliver his plans with reliance on Muskrat’s generosity and benevolence.  It came as a shock one day when he spotted a wedge of his closest swans flying overhead and leaving the river for the riverbank. It became obvious over time that they were not going to return.  Their nests were no longer on the river but a little bit set back on the bank. No longer did they have to forage for their own food because Muskrat met their needs. Trumpeter tried to entice them back with promises of old jobs in old places. But they all recognised that a nest on an earthen solid was far safer than one on an unpredictable river.  Particularly when they saw that a climactic event had wiped out the homesteads of Trumpeter’s most loyal. He talked a good line about helping them recover but no aid, not a jot, was forthcoming.

Trumpeter started to age very quickly. His supporters began to distance themselves from him. Within the space of a couple of years, it became obvious that he was a naked shadow, albeit still an orange one. His roost was  becoming more and more isolated and eventually the court of ‘President’ Muskrat was where the power lay.

Meanwhile on a lonely wilderness lake in a northern country far, far away , a solitary loon had offered its plaintive cry and the other creatures had begun to listen.

As I entered my teens some 60 years ago, there was a moment when I discovered that I liked poetry. I no longer like poetry, I love poetry. Poetry has been my comfort and my joy for so long.

On solitary walks I will recite poems I have memorised to myself. If I am unlikely to meet people I will recite poetry out loud. If I awake in the night and am unable to get back to sleep, I will test my memory. If I have my back pack with me I will always ensure that I have a Robbie Burns anthology lurking somewhere within. If I am waiting for a train, plane or aeroplane I will reach for my book of poems. Just occasionally when I am in company I will burst into a rendition of a poem that I love. I don’t do that often because people become embarrassed when I do. So I guess we cannot pick our embarrassments. Every man to his own taste as the old wife said as she kissed the cow!

One would think that, with this expressed passion of mine, I would be keen to try my hand at writing poetry. I have tried my hand and am absolutely terrible at it. I guess that at some point in my life I was disappointed that I could not achieve anything of note in this sphere but I can’t remember being overburdened with chagrin. Instead I became more than happy to read and learn the poetry of others. I am overawed by the abilities of a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Tennyson to write with such succinct clarity and such rhythmical discipline. It is, perhaps, a sad reflection of my life that I can recite from memory over one thousand lines of Robbie Burns on a good day. Mmmmm, perhaps a bad day if one has to listen to it. So, Dear Reader, as we approach Burns Night on January 25^th, I am revisiting my Burns for something appropriate for the night. I am determined not to submit our guests to over 200 lines of ‘Tam O’Shanter’ as once I did. I tried to persuade them that it was not my fault but it was a duty I had to perform. Behind the glazed eyes I could sense that they were unconvinced. They would not be so polite the second time around, Dear Reader. Incidentally there is a valley in Iceland which probably still reverberates from this epic poem as I spouted it with vigour as I walked my lonesome way up it in 2016.  I now consider this to have been somewhat foolhardy of me because the whole island is an active volcano and nothing is more likely to stir up the lava juices than an hefty rendition of this Burns epic. Even worse might have been an outburst of ‘To a haggis”! This year guests are going to get a truncated version of “The Twa Dogs” which is a poem I have come to love.

Many years ago, Landseer the painter, painted Burns’ two dogs in magnificent detail. I stumbled on his picture on Amazon and could not resist ordering a print. Hopefully it will arrive before our party.

Burns was at his most effective when he used nature to propound his beliefs on the human condition His “To a Mouse’ is a wee gem of a poem. John Steinbeck quoted from it as the title of probably his most famous novel, “Of Mice and Men”.

“The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”

Is the fuller quotation.

“To a Louse” never fails to produce a smile as Burns sits behind a young woman in church watching as a louse crawls up her bonnet.

“O wad the power the beastie gie us to see oorsels as ithers see us.”

And oh how one fails in that judgement of oneself. Dear Reader, just when I think that I have mastered the tightrope walk between hubris and humility, I am unbalanced and falling headlong into the valley of folly before the wisdom and honesty of Irene. But what happens to us if we have not an Irene to tell us who we really are? Everybody needs a ‘beastie’ and if that happens to be one’s wife then that is why she is the better half.

But back to those two dogs in “The Twa Dogs”, the one is the laird’s dog, Caesar. He is the rich man’s dog, the one with the fancy collar. His friend, Luath, is a plowman’s collie. Wealth meets poverty. After frolicking about, they eventually sit down and discuss each other’s station in life. In doing so they present a wonderful panorama of how society operated in the Scotland of the 18^th Century. Over 200 lines of perceptive brilliance, shrewd understanding and masterful rhyme and rhythm, all from the mouths of two dogs who are friends that cross the class divide.

Maybe when I first read this poem, I was tired, Dear Friends. Maybe I had a problem that needed solving. Perhaps there was a burning issue in my life that was causing angst. But there was a moment at the end when I had a lump in my throat, a deep feeling of pathos and sadness almost overwhelmed me. I think it was because in the last eight lines which signalled the end of their discussion, I knew that I was never to meet these characters again and I was saddened by it. That is strange to me, Dear Reader, because generally I am not that emotional about much let alone the written word but here are the last 8 lines of the poem which so demonstrably hit home to me:-

“By this the sun was out o’sight,

An’ darker gloamin brought the night

The bum-clock hummed wi’ lazy drone,

The kye stood rowtan I’ the loan;

When up they gat an’ shook their lugs,

Rejoiced they were na men but dugs;

And each took off his several way,

Resolv’d to meet some ither day.”

                                                               Happy New Year to you all.

‘For auld lang syne’, Dear Friends.

Aaah, Dear Friends, let me introduce Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Some of you may have heard of him and, no doubt, all of you would like to pronounce his name. Young Grant Harder, a name you probably can pronounce, is the only person I know who can say his name properly. I will try to get in touch with this most wonderful of teachers and ask him to help me out. But, in the meantime, Dear Reader, forget I ever mentioned him, Mihaly C, that is, not Grant Harder, and try to adjust your focus to my pathetic wee tale.

I walk with a friend every week. His wife drops him off and I take him home thereafter. I was so doing a few weeks ago but had on my mind a few tasks that had to be done. It would be fair to say that I was a bit distant that day, my mind was on other things. I had just had my car serviced and was told that I really needed to replace my snow tyres as two of them were looking somewhat worn. Another expense which I could have done without. I was also dealing with an annoying bureaucratic issue which was not being sorted out in the few days it should have taken. A friend suggested that I trek along to my federal MP and that, generally, Liberal MP Jonathan Wilkinson is an help in these matters. My son suggested an excellent tyre place and my friend told me where the MP had his office. They were 100 yards apart on a local street.

I had a wonderful walk with my friend, dropped him at home and suddenly had a thought. The tyres and the MP were on the way home but I really wanted my lunch. Did I really want to pull over at an area where parking would be difficult, line up to make an appointment for new tyres a couple of weeks down the road, then pop in to Mr. Wilkinson’s office to discover that it was closed and there was nobody to help? I would give it a try but I felt it was a forlorn hope. Maybe if I had downed a chicken pot pie and sated my hunger I would have been more optimistic. I am a simple soul.

There was no parking spot, just a jagged car free zone outside the tyre place. I shook my head and pulled over and parked illegally. I went into the office where the guy behind the desk was just finishing with a customer. I explained that I needed four new winter tyres for a Mazda 3. What type of tyres? No idea. Was the car here? Out front. He dashed out from behind his desk, turned the corner and looked at my car. He gave me a quote and told me to return in 20 minutes and it would be done. I was gobsmacked. I left. I wandered down the street, found the MP’s office and was told to walk up the hill to the back and buzz for entry. I was welcomed by a young man, Thomas, who sat me down and took all my details and promised to do his best. I left, walked back to the tyre place, paid the bill and was told it was parked on the other side of the street. I was unable to wipe the smile off my face during the 20 minute drive home, Dear Reader.

So, Friends, you will know what a state of flow is because you all will have had moments when things just fit into place seamlessly. You have all been there. It is the tennis serve that always goes in; the problem with which you have struggled for hours and walked away from and then found that the solution was bleeding obvious; it’s the lesson which you taught and suddenly found that all the children were immersed in it and had learned from it; it is struggling to find the right words and opening one’s mouth and finding that they are there. I would love to hear from you on my email about your personal ‘states of flow’.

I guess that the opposite of state of flow is ‘Murphy’s Law’ when what can go wrong, will go wrong. We have all had those events, have we not? I guess that this is a ‘a state of unflow’.

My erstwhile colleague and friend, Grant Harder, has a problem he doesn’t know he has yet, Dear Reader. You see, friends and I battle with the Globe and Mail cryptic crossword every morning. Sometimes nothing happens. Try as we might we cannot get started. The world is a blank, the words do not flow. Inwardly I start to panic. Age has caught up with me. That which once I had I have no more. My head droops, my confidence wanes. I ‘woe is me’ my way home, slump in a chair and try to find my sunny uplands, serene moments and better days. I dabble in other things, I look for wee tasks, I go for a long walk. I return home and there on the dining room table is my pen and my blank crossword taunting me, teasing me, mocking me. I shrug my shoulders and pick it up. Then there is a moment. I answer a clue and soon all is revealed, I have completed the crossword, admittedly with phone call help from my friend. But all is suddenly right with my world again. But if it continues to go wrong, then I mutter ‘Grant Harder, Grant Harder’ under my breath because if he had never told me about ‘unpronounceable’ I would have just accepted that blundering on was my state of being. It was how I had happily spent most of my life but now my friend had taught me that I could achieve something better. Soooo, when ‘better’ didn’t work, I mouthed monstrous mendaciousness towards Mr. Grant Harder.

But, at the back of my mind, there is a niggle. Why, Oh, why? What was it that a few hours earlier was so difficult and now was solved with relative ease?

Maybe Grant Harder would be off the hook if I could mutter Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi under my breath. But I can’t, as I said before, the estimable Harder is the only one I know who can pronounce him.

Seasons greetings to you and yours.

Here in 2024, the recent November 11^th Remembrance Day arrived on a Monday. Here in North Vancouver, Irene, Grant and I attended the ceremony at the cenotaph in Victory Square. It was an overcast, chill day but the rain held off.

I don’t know what I feel about attending this ceremony every year, sometimes I have to force myself out of the door. I do know, Dear Friends, that I will attend. I have learned more and more over the years about why I will attend.

In the early 1920s my grandmother found somebody to marry. She was lucky. Why? Because there weren’t many eligible men around at that time in the years after the First World War, millions had been killed in action. Jimmy Davidson found Eleanor Chessor at a church picnic. He was a miller in Aberdeenshire so had not gone off to war. Men in the farming industry were exempt from service. Britain needed to feed its people. My other grandfather was not so lucky. Dr. Peter Tolmie served in the war but he was a surgeon, so he was faced with the daunting task of saving the lives of young men who had become wounded. Fit and healthy one moment, amputated or blind the next.

When I was a teenager, every Christmas my father invited two sisters, the Miss Thoms,  for Christmas dinner at our house. With the self-centredness of youth I took no interest in why these two cailleach were suddenly in our house on Christmas Day and at no other time of the year. I later learned that both of them had lost their boyfriends in the ‘Great War’, as it was known then, and had never married. Presumably they had not found a young man thereafter because of the aforementioned paucity. But, I also think there was some survivors’ guilt, a determined loyalty to what could have been.

My father, Dr. Wattie Davidson, had completed his medical training before war’s end in the Second World War and had been despatched to India and Palestine. He did not last long. On December 17^th, 1944, his 20 year old brother serving in the RAF in Italy was shot down and killed over Forli in Northern Italy. He was sent home because he was the oldest son of a widowed mother.

In 1970, I was living with my other grandmother in Nairn and working in the Nairnshire Laundry. The time came for me to return home to the family in Somerset. My Great Uncle Jim who was living with Grandma at the time offered to help to carry my bags the half a mile or so down to the bus station. When I arrived home and let slip that he had done so, my mother was not at all happy with me. It wasn’t so much the fact that Jim was in his early 90s but,

“How could you, Peter, Jim was gassed at Gallipolli?”

Jim was about the fittest 90 something I had ever met and the effects of a gas attack some 50 years previously did not show at all!

At Lincoln Rugby Club in 1990, the club was about to lose players. Iraq had invaded Kuwait and the air force bases in our area supplied our club with rugby players. I saw the changes in their demeanours as they realised that they were very soon going to find themselves at war. Nobody wants to go to war less than the men and women who are going to have to fight it. My team mates were obviously scared.

I have just finished reading Victor Hugo’s epic novel “Les Miserables”, of course now the musical is more famous. I have been lucky enough to see the play and the TV version thereof. But, Dear Reader, as is often the case, nothing can compare to the book. I was at the Battle of Waterloo through his magnificent description. I was standing on the barriers during the riots of 1832. And I was escaping through the sewers with an unconscious Marius on Valjean’s back. Victor Hugo was more than an author and poet, he was a statesman who pushed against slavery believing that all mankind was guilty if there was but one slave left on the planet. He also believed in the United States of Europe and that war between Europeans was a civil war. He predicted that the 20^th Century would see the end of war. He lived between 1802 and 1885. It is no fault of his that we have not seen an end to war or poverty but, like Charles Dickens, he did not shy away from uncomfortable truths. There was a lump in my throat when I finally finished reading “Les Miserables”.

Spike Milligan was an humorist and raconteur. On his grave stone which my brother, George, stumbled upon recently, he has written in Gaelic, “I told you I was ill”.  Before a live audience of celebrities in London, he recounted one of his war stories. Late in the war his troop stumbled on a squadron of what they thought were American soldiers. They moved into the open only to discover that they were wrong when some German paratroopers opened up on them, causing them to duck hastily. One of that German troop matched the date and day and information on troop movements and many years after the war contacted Spike in London. Spike invited him to lunch at which they imbibed and reminisced far into the afternoon. As they parted, his erstwhile enemy asked if he could sign Spike’s menu. On it he wrote,

‘Sorry I missed you on February 15^th, 1945.”

They departed with chuckles and smiles and Spike asked him to stand up after he told this story because he invited him to be a part of his audience. This is a war story which I have enjoyed reading.

It only takes one man’s ego to throw the world into a maelstrom of hurt. And we know by watching the evening news that always, always it is the civilian population which suffers most in a war, ‘twas ever thus. So, Dear Reader, Davidson may grumble inwardly at getting his act together to pay respect to those who have seen what he would not want to see and to those who have done what he would not want to have done. But there is reason enough in a movement of my head to the left of my computer where sits a photograph of a young man in his RAF uniform at 20 years of age. All of his life is before him, except that it is not. He has an energetic, joyous smile on his face as you can see in the photograph at the head of this blog. The epitaph on his grave reads as follows:-

“To have lost him is grievous but to have had him is great gain that abides.”

That is all I need to get myself to the cenotaph.

Flying Officer Billy Davidson did not reach his coming of age, he was killed nearly 80 years ago before his 21^st birthday.

Lest we forget.