Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson October 05
COMING OUT of the Green Wellie Shop the other day, I saw an old girl friend walking towards me. She had worn extremely well and still looked great. Had my brain not been working in panicky overdrive to recall her name or even place her, I’d have realised she’d worn too well, for I’ve been happily out of that market for decades.
But I remembered her so clearly that I knew we must have shared some grand passion in the past. It would be horribly ill-mannered to ignore her now.She smiled at me and I smiled at her - or it may have been the other way round - and I said ‘Excuse me, we know each other, don’t we?’ Then it clicked and I continued. ‘Oh, you’re on the tele. I’m so sorry.’ She laughed and we went our opposite ways.
Virtually every day for a decade or more she has smiled at me from one or other of the BBC news programmes. Although it took me considerable rummaging through my wits to come up with her name - Fiona Henderson - I know her face better than those of many of my own family. |
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I can hardly blame my brain for being slightly freaked.It may sound arrogant to consider that she might have smiled first, but it’s that fame thing again which I last observed with Jordan at Edinburgh Airport. The famous, which these days amounts to those with well-known TV faces, look different for the rest of us. They have to. All their normal visual cues for social interaction are missing. If someone grins at me, it’s because I know them - or my flies are undone. But if your face is well known every glance you meet will engage with yours. The eyes of the famous have to drift to avoid being snagged up on every stare and they must wear a neutrally benign expression. It’s just bad luck if they have to connect because someone virtually bounces them in a doorway. At best they’re likely to end up with babbled nonsense.
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The Green Wellie Shop was a comfort stop as I was acting as guide on one of two busloads of overseas visitors to the Clan Donnachaidh Gathering on a trip to Inveraray. They were mainly Robertsons, Duncans and Reids treading in the footsteps of their forebears who had a penchant for marching down to Loch Tay and Glen Dochart on raids into Campbell country.
One of those expeditions was under the command of King Robert Bruce. That one ended less than satisfactorily since the party was ambushed near Tyndrum and they had to make a fighting retreat during which Bruce lost his plaid and his brooch which is still in possession of the victorious Macdougalls.
But there we all were some seven centuries later, clambering across bogs and burns to find tiny and beautiful Loch nan Arm - bizarrely perched on top of a drumlin and invisible until you are upon it - where our ancestors dumped their mail and armour to speed their retreat and ensure such valuables did not fall into the hands of the enemy. The narrow gully alongside is the likely spot where Bruce lost his brooch and we deduced from the gnarled tree stumps poking from the peat that it was probably wooded in those days.
Internet genealogy is hugely popular. The inhabitants of those countries originally populated by immigrants are all trying to establish their roots and their identities. If you’re a Smith originally from Peckham, or descend from a Rabinowicz who fled a pogrom in some remote village in the steppes there won’t be a lot left for you to find. But if you can trace yourself back to a Highland clan, you are truly blessed.
The hundred or so visitors last weekend from the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were welcomed as family by the local clan members. They met the chief. They saw the little museum dedicated to the heritage of their own family. They did not get too drunk when they dressed themselves in the fabulous kit that comes with such a descent for the clan dinner in Pitlochry. They worshipped with the clan chaplain on Sunday at the church of Struan which has been the clan’s kirk for centuries and it was the clan which prevented the Duke of Atholl demolishing it in 1819. And they toured this beautiful part of Scotland where their forebears struggled to make a living on land which is now good for nothing more than conifers or deer. They went home happy bunnies and left some of their dosh behind to enrich our local economy.
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There you are, a peaceful denizen of a local hedgerow. You’ve reared your family over the summer and now have the freedom of consume autumn’s bounty without any pressure.
Then some swine releases 30,000 pea-brained young pheasants on your patch. If we whinge about a few economic migrants entering the country and taking jobs and bread from our mouths, imagine what it must be like for the local wildlife when they open the bird pens.
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‘Photographs from Nasa’s orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor show recently-formed craters and gullies. The agency’s scientists also say that deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet’s south pole have shrunk for three summers in a row. They say this is evidence to suggest climate change is in progress.’
Are those profligate Martians burning fossil fuels? Perhaps we can ship them their own Griffin Forest. Or it may be that global warming, whatever your planet, is part of Nature’s grand scheme of things
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