Scotland: National Rural Network
Connecting Rural Scotland - Promoting Rural Growth

By Patrick Vickery

Some folks keep diaries, others keep blogs, the essential difference being that a diary is personal and private whereas a Blog is open to anyone with internet access so you have to be a bit careful what you put on it. The same goes for this article, of course, so I have to be careful or I could be in perilous danger of assault in the shrubberies of Scotland.

Come to think of it, it's probably safer to write fiction rather than fact. But anyway, I have a blog and looking through past entries the other day it triggered a number of recollections about people met, things done and situations encountered.

I had a conversation with ‘Martha' about a ‘cran' as I shifted stoneware pots about her garden. "The cran will do this", "the cran will do that", she said, until finally I interrupted her flow of speech to enquire what a cran was. "It's a cran", she roared, and then it clicked that a "cran" was in fact a crane for lifting things (like stoneware pots, for example). I was speaking to a Glaswegian. Not long after this I came across a guy called Mr Cran. Some coincidence, eh?

"A cran is a measure of herring, as well as being a scale on the Irish pipes" he said, "and most Crans can trace their roots back to Aberdeen."

So there you are, fascinating.

My old chum ‘Bingo', an ex-world war two pilot who adopted a scorched earth policy in his garden by burning weeds with a flame thrower (‘weed-burning stick', Garden Centre, priced £20) moved to a residential home for the elderly (none of that ‘aged-challenged' gobbledy-gook speak for me) where he continues to enjoy life to the full. I still tend to his garden (he visits occasionally) and in particular notice the absence of scorch marks and the wiff of spent smoke that used to be so prevalent amidst the shrubberies and the flower beds.

The mysterious Mrs ‘Mac' also comes to mind, now deceased (the challenge of age was just too challenging), an espionage expert during WW2 who insisted I put goose fat around her roses to encourage vigorous growth. An interesting idea, that, and possibly a throwback to horticulture from earlier times.

Mentioning this in print caused a few emails to fly thick and fast in my direction from the Beechgrove Garden Team. Not advised, they counselled, don't do that, not that Mrs ‘Mac' would have taken a blind bit of notice, she knew Churchill, after all, and was on nodding terms with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta.

And while loosely on the subject of eatable birds, goose fat and the like, a certain character of the district, not far off ninety and of surprising agility for a man of his age, used to keep Muscovy ducks and well recalls the occasional errant character fleeing from his garden with a Muscovy under one arm and a shore of tatties in the other with himself in hot pursuit bellowing, "there's no such thing as a free lunch, you bounder!" Did he ever catch them? I don't know. But I wouldn't like to have been in their shoes if he had.

So that's it, a few recollections of people met over the past year. If I reach those age-challenging years myself, of course, I shall aspire to setting fire to things in the garden and chasing errants down the road bellowing "there's no such thing as a free lunch, you bounder". And why not?

Footnote: As I send this off to the Rural Gateway I have been informed that ‘Bingo' has expired and is no more. I was tempted to suggest a slightly novel method of cremation - bonfire, weed burning stick - but in the end thought better of it. He certainly would have approved but others might not. He was a good man, ‘Bingo', I shall miss his eccentric ways.

Copyright Patrick Vickery

This article first appeared in the Ross-shire Journal and on the Rural Gateway website