Sunday, January 13th .....

We’re camped in Deloraine at the moment, to give me a chance to file away last year’s Craft Fair papers and start the ball rolling for this year.  Marilyn and I drove to Hobart on Thursday for a meeting with our Media Adviser.  When she was appointed by the previous director, I was critical because I had visions of the over-paid and under-worked Media Advisors who work for politicians and manage to keep their jobs in every purge of the Public Service. Clearly, however, that’s just another grumpy old man prejudice that I’ve developed.

Paula is an energetic and intelligent young woman with a great imagination.  She has worked in PR and Media for years and knows everyone who is worth knowing.  Our conversation on Thursday was very productive and a clear image of the 2013 is starting to emerge. 

Life in the caravan is certainly different from our normal pattern.  We tend to sleep until about 9 o’clock, have a leisurely breakfast, read for a bit and suddenly realise that it’s noon and we’ve done nothing.  To balance the late start, we often stay up till after midnight.  With the long evenings, we can walk or do some chores when the air is cooler.

I’ve been working on a brief family tree for my uncle.  He’s just turned 88 and thinking more of his younger years.  His father came from a long line of weavers who, in later generations, moved in to the coal industry.  His mother’s family were agricultural workers in Ayrshire.  It’s typical of many Scottish working class families who were pioneers in the Industrial Revolution.  In many ways, they were cannon fodder, underpaid and dispensable, but they were the worker ants whose energy and loyalty made Scotland the leader of the industrial world in the 19^th century. 

Archie left home at 14 and was apprenticed to a baker. 

On the outbreak of WW2, he joined the Merchant Navy and worked on convoys across the North Atlantic between Glasgow and Halifax, and even on the Murmansk run on a number of occasions.  Thousands died in these ships which were at the mercy of the U-boats.  Archie never talks of the danger; he always boasts of the food he could buy in Halifax, to take home to his family who were doing it tough back in Scotland.

Searching for old photographs has turned up gems.  The one I’ve included here is of my grandmother, Dad and his sister, and my younger brother and me, taken outside our tenement building in Clark Street, Blantyre.  It must have been taken about 1948 or 1949.

Dad’s sister, Nettie, lives in England and I hope to visit her in April.  I haven’t seen her since 1950 and I suspect she would have changed a bit since then.

Marilyn and I watched a terrific movie the other day.  It’s called Salmon Fishing in Yemen, and has Ewan McKenzie in it.  It’s lightweight but heart-warming.  Listen to me, recommending heart-warming movies!  I must be getting sentimental in my old age.