Words

My words, other people's words, wise words, favourite words.

Drabbles

A drabble is a bit of writing which comprises of exactly 100 words. There are all sorts of rules about punctuation etc but for my purposes I rely on Word's Wordcount. Here are my drabbles.

Prestonpans

"The Pans" lies 9 miles east of Edinburgh, nestling between Musselburgh and Cockenzie on the beautiful East Lothian coast. With its quick road connections to the A1 and 14 minute railway journey from Edinburgh, this historic burgh is currently a property “hotspot”.

Famous for the 1745 battle and its industrial past, today’s attractions include Prestongrange Museum, Preston Tower, the Mural trail and the Mercat Cross.

Lesser known is that it was a retreat of Sir Walter Scott; had the oldest recorded lodge in the world and was the birthplace of Sir William Fergusson; John Horsburgh; John Abercrombie & James Howden.

Last Day of Term

At the babies & toddlers party the young guests were scared of the bouncy castle but played happily with the usual toys. Each child received a toy. Lucy got a giggling doll, which she adores and Georgie's gift was a musical snail… which Lucy adores.

There was an excited buzz in the playground as we waited for Emily. Mums swapped shopping-for-presents stories. Young siblings wore Santa hats. The teachers looked happy.

When we got home, Georgie was still asleep in her pram. Emily sat beside me showing me her Christmas artwork. Lucy danced to Boogie Beebies unaware we were watching.

Cow

When I was about 5 and playing in the school playground, a girl said that her mum allowed her to eat grass. I said I didn't believe her and she insisted it was true. I said something like "well, go on then, eat some grass now". She did.

She then began running around on all fours "moo-ing". She only stopped when she bumped into a tree and started bawling loudly.

An adult (I'm not sure whether it was a teacher or playground supervisor) came over to investigate and the assembled crowd told her that I made the girl eat grass.

Looking a million dollars

When my great-aunt and uncle won the lottery, they shared their good fortune with their family. That is the kind of people they are.

My aunt comes from a large family which includes my nana. My nana shared her windfall with her five children, one of whom is my mother. My mum divvied up her share with her four children with the instruction to "spend it on yourself".

Always one to do what my mum tells me I took myself off to the hairdressers and had myself a 'do'. Thank you Mum and Nana and Auntie Ann & Uncle Bill.

Buddy Lists

I have friends I haven't ever met. Our paths have crossed online through shared interests or serendipity. They are friends - of a sort - but I could no more number them than I could tell you their eye colour.

Someone has befriended me. Or rather, they've added me to a list of "friends" hoping I will reciprocate thus increasing their number of "friends".

These contrived friends, buddies, or fans, whatever they are called, are like loyalty points. You are not really sure how you got them, where you get them or what you are going to do with them.

Time

Almost daily, someone points at the three girls, or at the double buggy laden with groceries, and says "you've got your hands full". If I had a pound for every time this has happened I would, alas, not have enough to employ an au pair, but maybe enough to hire a French maid's outfit.

People often ask how we manage to keep our website updated or find the time four our projects. I wonder how other people manage to keep their houses tidy, apply make-up and still find time to do ironing. I suspect the two questions are somehow related…

Misunderstanding

An aquaintance had given me the details of an accountant she recommended. When I finally got round to getting our finances in order, I couldn't find the information.

Nigel suggested I ask her again. "I can't do that, she'll think I'm fishing for a freebie" I said.

Nonplussed, Nigel asked what I meant. "Well, her husband's an accountant isn't he? I can't ask her again." I explained.

"An accountant? Are you sure?" Nigel mused. "It was you that told me!" I said disbelievingly.
"Me?" says Nigel. "I said he sold books".

"Oh, I thought you said he was a bookkeeper".

Reduction

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - that's what Friends of the Earth want us to do. I try. I really do.

Recycling is the easy part thanks to kerbside collections.

Reusing stuff takes a bit of getting used to but is not too hard.

Reducing, is, for the most part, out of my hands.

It drives me mad to see unnecessary packaging so I was quite irked when Nigel bought a shrinkwrapped butternut squash in a polystyrene tray.

It transpired that there were several 'au naturale' squashes but this one had been reduced to clear. Presumably this isn't what greenies mean by 'reducing'.

John Rattray - the golfing surgeon

Rattray, John (1707-1771), golfer and physician, was born on 22 September 1707 at Craighall Castle, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, the second son of Thomas Rattray (1684-1743), Scottish Episcopal bishop of Dunkeld, and Margaret (c.1690–1737), daughter of Thomas Galloway, second Baron Dunkeld. In 1728 he was apprenticed to John Semple, a practitioner surgeon in Edinburgh; he completed his apprenticeship in 1735. In 1740 he passed the four examining sessions of the Company of Surgeons of Edinburgh and was subsequently admitted a freeman surgeon. On 7 May 1742 he married his first wife, Christian, the daughter of George Main, an Edinburgh jeweller; the couple had three sons and three daughters. After her death he married Margaret, daughter of the politician and Jacobite sympathizer George Lockhart of Carnwath, with whom he had one daughter.

In addition to his medical studies Rattray was a keen and skilled sportsman. In 1731 he became a member of the Royal Company of Archers; he was four times winner of their silver bowl (1732, 1735, 1740, and 1742) and twice—in 1735 and 1744—received the company's highest award, the silver arrow. He was also the leading golfer at Leith links near Edinburgh, the setting for the first printed book devoted to golf, Thomas Mathison's The Goff (1743) in which he appears:

Rattray for skill, and Corse for strength renowned,

Stewart and Lesly beat the sandy ground.

(Mathison, 4)

In the year after The Goff's publication the regular players at Leith, including Rattray, moved to establish an annual golfing competition for a silver club presented by the city of Edinburgh, equivalent to the silver arrow donated to the Royal Company of Archers in 1709. The city corporation noted that the newly formed Company of Gentlemen Golfers had drawn up regulations for play, consisting of twelve generic articles or rules plus one specific to Leith links, which they approved in March 1744. In April Rattray was victorious in this first ever golf tournament and so earned the title ‘captain of the goff’ for winning the £15 silver club. Rattray, as captain, had the authority to settle disputes between fellow golfers and was responsible for superintending the course in the year of his captaincy. Debate surrounds the authorship of these regulations, which were signed by Rattray and which—on matters of order of play, outside interference, water hazards, holing out, making a stroke, and the stroke and distance penalty for the loss of a ball—remain an integral part of the modern game. Rattray's sole signature does not guarantee that he was wholly responsible for them, though his prominence within the company and Edinburgh society at large makes him the most likely candidate. Under these rules he went on to win the silver club for a second time in April 1745.

Rattray was prevented from defending his captaincy in the following year because of his role in the Jacobite rising of 1745 as a surgeon to Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. From a family long sympathetic to the Stuart cause, Rattray became involved with the Jacobite campaign in the aftermath of the victory at Prestonpans (September 1745). Summoned from his house at 1a South Foulis Close, Edinburgh, by Laurence Oliphant, sixth laird of Gask, Rattray rode to the battlefield with a fellow surgeon, George Lauder. From there he accompanied the Jacobite army into England (whether voluntarily or under coercion is unknown) and then followed the Young Pretender's forces as they retreated from Derby in the spring of 1746. Rattray surrendered to Cumberland's army following the defeat at Culloden. He was subsequently rearrested in Edinburgh in May and sent to London under house arrest before being released in 1747 as part of a general amnesty once he had signed an oath of obedience.

Having sworn his allegiance to the Hanoverian regime, Rattray returned to his life as an Edinburgh surgeon and golfer. In 1751 he won back the silver club and captaincy (his third and final victory), but did not compete in the following year. The last reference to him in the company's archives is 1759, the year in which he described himself as a ‘cripple’. Bills for service to Lord Milton show that he continued to practise as a surgeon until at least 1766. He died at Leith Walk, Edinburgh, on 5 July 1771. As an episcopalian and a nonjuror his burial record has been erased from the Edinburgh register.

Extract from South Leith Parish Registers regarding The Banning of Playing Golf on a Sunday (pdf)

Rattray Genealogy (PDF)

COLIN J. L. STRACHAN and JAN BARKER Sources T. Mathison, ‘The Goff’: an heroi–comical poem (1743) · ‘Regulations for playing for the city's silver club’, minutes, Edinburgh town council, 7 March 1744 · Scots Magazine, 6 (1744), 197 · Records of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (1740) · J. Gilhooley, A directory of Edinburgh in 1752 (1988) · K. G. Chapman, The rules of the green: authority of the rules of golf (Chicago, 1997) · A. J. Johnston and J. F. Johnston, The chronicles of golf, 1457–1857 (Cleveland, 1993) · J. S. Lawson, The original rules of golf (1981) · O. M. Geddes, A swing through time: golf in Scotland, 1457–1743 (1992) · M. M. Whittet, ‘Medical resources of the 'Forty Five’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 44 (1961), 1–41 · W. A. Macnaughton, ‘Medical heroes of the Forty Five’, Caledonian Medical Journal, 3 (1897–9), 82–93, 155–62, 208–13 · NL Scot., Lockhart of Lee MSS · parish register, Edinburgh, 1742 [marriage to Christian Main] · NL Scot., Milton MSS Archives Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, records and book of intrants Likenesses portrait; formerly at Craighall, Fife [now stolen]

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The Labour Party

The Labour Party is a demographic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.

Love 20¢ The First Quarter Mile

All right. I may have lied to you and about you, and made a few
pronouncements a bit too sweeping, perhaps, and possibly forgotten
to tag the bases here or there,
And damned your extravagence, and maligned your tastes, and libeled
your relatives, and slandered a few of your friends,
O.K.,
Nevertheless, come back.

Come home. I will agree to forget the statements that you issued so
copiously to the neighbors and the press,
And you will forget that figment of your imagination, the blonde from Detroit;
I will agree that your lady friend who lives above us is not crazy, bats,
nutty as they come, but on the contrary rather bright,
And you will concede that poor old Steinberg is neither a drunk, nor
a swindler, but simply a guy, on the eccentric side, trying to get along.
(Are you listening, you bitch, and have you got this straight?)

Because I forgive you, yes, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise,
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive, and pardon you, in short, for being you.

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black, all other hours are cold
and far away, and now, this minute, the stars are very near and bright

Come back. We will have a celebration to end all celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us, and a couple of
boys from the office, and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane woman who lives
upstairs, and a few reporters, if anything should break.

Kenneth Fearing

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