Auld acquaintance

Autumn draws on, with clear, crisp, sunny mornings and cold nights. The leaves are starting to turn and the blackberries are ripening, so it seemed a good time to indulge in some nostalgia. So down to Stirling...


I worked at Stirling University from 1993-2000 (that thing on the left, by the way, is the Wallace Monument, as in Braveheart, which was premiered at Stirling University. All the cleaners thought Mel Gibson was 'awfy wee'). The monument is pretty much at the University's back door. We lived first in Edinburgh and then in a flat in a little village called Kippen, way out in the country, before buying a very nice house in Dunblane in 1998. I got Bonnie a couple of months before I left Kippen, and then she came with me to Dunblane. (This was the start of our many moves: I've just worked out we're now on our 8th house together. Chloe the cat is still the winner, with 12 houses before she died in 2006, at the age of 16. What a collection of collar tags we've all got between us.)

Although I lived in Kippen for four years I didn't find it a very friendly place. Most people seemed to be commuters to Glasgow, and because it was a small place and a lot of the old houses had been turned into flats or converted from farm buildings, people seemed to be a bit territorial about things like boundaries and parking spaces - or perhaps they just didn't like English incomers. I think the doorbell rang all of twice in the time we lived there. Once it was someone collecting for Christian Aid, and once it was a woman from the local toddlers' group wanting to know if we had any children ('We' at the time was me and Patrick, who I met when I was working at Sussex Uni and we moved up to Scotland together). He's now a lecturer in Technology and Innovation at Bradford Uni. Anyway, most of our friends (and I made some very good ones, although they don't live in Kippen) had to do with Stirling University, and I'm still in touch with quite a few of them. So on this visit to the village I was more interested in the place than the people (although the artist Steven Campbell, who died last year, lived there - I remember meeting him and he showed me the cannabis plants he had growing in the garden). But it's a very pretty village with red sandstone houses, and an atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts about it. And there were, and are, many people in the village who are keen and accomplished gardeners, so the place looks lovely, particularly in summer.

Our flat was above a hairdresser's at The Cross - that's it in the picture with a big silver 4X4 parked outside, the windows almost hidden by the leaves of a cherry tree. It had two bedrooms, a tiny garden, and a lovely view from the lounge out across to the Trossachs. The kitchen had a low ceiling, fake beams, and was covered in the deepest, swirliest, scratchiest Artex I have ever come across. We thought many times about removing it, but our first attempt to start chipping it off was such hard work we covered the hole with a poster and forgot about it. I would love to have seen what's changed in the flat, and even spoke to the current tenant, bravely ringing the bell. He was very nice but didn't let me in - he said the place was too much of a mess. Ah well. That's my effin roof, by the way: I now understand the importance of a full structural survey on an old building you're trying to buy. The flat is 18th century, and we had to have a grant from Stirling Council to replace the entire roof as soon as we moved in. It was, apparently, 'nail sick'. I was all kinds of sick by the time it was finished.

There were two pubs in the village - The Cross Keys and The Crown. They have both gone way upmarket since we were there, and there are also two cafes, now, with tables on the pavement. The shop that used to be the newsagent now serves excellent coffee, and two chirpy girls, who were probably at primary school when I left, served me a nice filter coffee and some coffee and walnut cake.

Bonnie and I went on one of our old walks - in fact, this was the first walk we did together when I first got her from the SSPCA.. I remember carpeting the house with newspaper when I got her home because she wasn't housetrained and thinking 'What have I done?' because I was overawed by the responsibility of having a dog. She destroyed a few things when I went out to work - I remember once coming home to find her sitting in the middle of an enormous mess. She'd chewed up several rolls of film, some biros, a basket of daffodils, a copy of my PhD thesis, and a wooden sculpture from Poland that she'd pulled off the wall, shredded everything, mixed it all up, and dragged her blanket into the middle of it. She was sitting amongst all this, wagging, when I got home.

She was also into destroying plants - every plant in the house. I couldn't understand it - she'd just pull the plants out of the pots and empty the earth out. Then, when I found a doggie chew sticking out of a very inadequate pile of earth behind one of the pots, I realised what was going on in her brain: she was trying to hide food, and wanted the soil to do it with. She'd come from a house in which 19 dogs were shut up, and I guess having a food stash was vital. After that, I took away anything she didn't eat straight away, and the plant destruction stopped. She did wreck the cat flap on a couple of occasions, though, because she wanted to lie with her head sticking out of it to wait for me to come home and the plastic door got in the way. I think poor Chloe the cat didn't get all the use out of it she wanted, with Bonnie parked half in and half out all day long.

Bonnie soon learned that me with a dustpan and brush and a hoover, ignoring her, meant Badness, and stopped wrecking the place. It's hard to imagine she ever did it now. She's reformed. Although for some years she still couldn't resist film canisters. Now we have digital, today's dogs have to chew up something else, I suppose.

Anyway, the woodland walk was very nice, and gave some nice views over the Carse of Stirling (this is a broad, flat valley where crops are grown and that provides grazing for cattle). I have an identical photo of her on this walk taken ten years ago. Chloe used to come with us on some of the walks, and every time you turned round she'd have a wash and pretend she wasn't following us.

When Pat and I split up we sold the flat and I moved to Dunblane, where I knew a lot of people and had a group of girlfriends I'd got into the habit of lunching with once a week. I got involved in Dunblane Folk Club which had pub sessions every Wednesday night and organised a festival, the Doune and Dunblane Fling each May. My job was collecting prizes for the raffle, and one year I even managed to get airlines to give us free tickets as prizes.


Dunblane, of course, has an association in most people's minds with the murders of 13 children and their teacher at Dunblane Primary. I moved there about a year later. It was (and is, still, for some) a terrible time, and I remember the flowers stretching for what seemed like miles along the street. Apart from that reputation, though, it's an ancient town with a very old and elegant cathedral and a long history, and in terms of amenity and the people there is a wonderful place to live, home to many artists, academics, and other interesting people.

The Allan Water runs through it, haunt of ducks, dippers, kingfishers and herons, and it has a disused golf course which forms a lovely wildish area for dogwalking. Since I left there has been a lot of new building, but the atmosphere of the town remains unchanged.


I lived in an area called Ramoyle, which was even then quite chic and full of lovely little cottages with brightly-coloured windows and doors. I had a look at my old house and garden and was pleased to see that the landscaping I did and the rose I planted up the front of the cottage still look lovely.

I spent the day and evening with Sylvia and Paul, who used to be my next-door neighbours, and their sons Jonathan and Christopher. They admired the van a great deal (the boy in the foreground is James, a friend of Christopher's, and a very nice polite boy!). Sylvia and I went shopping in Stirling during the day, which was fun, and had lunch in the historic Barnton Bistro opposite the station, which Robert (now in Australia, but a student at Stirling in the early days sometime in the late 70s) first took me to when we were on a cycling trip in around 1987, and I went in there quite a lot while I was lecturing at Stirling. The Bistro has always been a student haunt, and anyone in Stirling with pretensions to scribbling deep thoughts in a notebook while drinking coffee always goes there. In Stirling this time, I bought a really good book on mushrooms while Sylvia got Paul a present because it was his birthday the next day.

On another day I went over to Stirling and saw Dave and Tessa - Tessa was a colleague in Japanese Studies who now teaches the linguistics course I set up while I was there. And during my visit, Ian, also an ex-lecturer in Japanese, and his son Phil dropped in for a visit. They're in Manchester now and had coincidentally decided on doing their own nostalgia trip the same weekend.



I also went over to see dear friends Bethan and Mark and their son Idris, now two. Bethan is a lecturer in my old department who is a fellow linguist, and we've always kept in touch. She is one of the loveliest people I know: clever, sensible, kind, and straightforward. I thought of her a lot when I was in the Western Isles, because she's a sharp-eyed birder and we went on many trips to the Islands together. I'm sure I walked past tons of birds that Bethan would have spotted. Mark works for Glasgow Museums and is a very interesting historian with a love of music, politics and lots of interesting things. Son Idris is shortly to be joined (and I mean in ten days or so!) by a new sister or brother. We went for a walk round near where Mark's mum and her partner Alan live, a place called Argaty where there is an introduced colony of Red Kites. Our walk was slow, due to Idris's fascination with stones, grass, and pretty much everything else, but then we went to see granny Ro and Alan in their cottage.


I was so impressed. Mark lived in the little farm cottage before he moved in with Bethan, and he sort of passed on the tenancy to his mum when they sold a pub and house in Lincolnshire and moved up. They've transformed the place - Alan is a carpenter, and both of them love gardening, so they've annexed bits of the field to extend their vegetable plot. Alan's built a little porch so you can still sit outside in bad weather, and they've got chickens and two dogs and a cat. It's the lifestyle I hanker after! After our walk, Ro appeared with four mugs of tea and a plate of shortbread and cake, which were very welcome. Idris fed the hens, and Ro gave me some fresh eggs to take away with me (which I served up scrambled to my friend Stewart the next morning, with hand-picked chanterelles).



In the evening, we went back to Bethan and Mark's and read Idris some stories (is it normal for two-year-olds to be able to count to ten? Just wondered). Idris is very funny. His favourite word at the moment is 'rubbish', Mummy's rubbish, Daddy's rubbish, and sometimes, Idris is rubbish. Bethan asked him if Bonnie was rubbish, and he said no, Bonnie's nice. So he has a fine sense of discrimination. After his bedtime, we had a Chinese takeaway (my first since Stornoway). It was great, although I think Bethan regretted it, because there isn't much stomach room with a full-term baby in there. But apart from the bump, just like old times!






Final visit was to Martin and Diana at their lovely big house in Dunblane. Martin was a lecturer in English when I came to Stirling, and a well-known linguist, and I've seen him in London and in Dunblane depending on where we both are. Diana his wife is lovely and is very interested in plants, so we always have a look round the garden at what's new. Like all gardeners, Diana is hyper-critical of her own garden, but I think it's lovely. I am disappointed to find that I didn't take a picture of Diana herself, so you will have to make do with some of her plants!




We decided to go on a walk up Dumyat, which is the hill that dominates the skyline near the University. It got very wet, but it was a good walk, and we came back for tea, a hot shower, a warm fire, and some shortbread. It was the nearest to home I've been since I've been away, if you see what I mean. Diana even did a load of washing for me. So I went back to the campsite feeling very cosy and glad to have seen them.


All this time I was staying at a campsite between Doune and Stirling, a site called Blair Drummond on the A84.
Doune is a very pretty village with a castle I used to walk around a lot - that's a picture of the castle. Parts of the Doune and Dunblane Fling are held in it in May, and there's often things like historical re-enactments there. I once went with friends Jon and Vina from Edinburgh to something there when there was a battle going on, and a man dressed in medieval gear let 2-year-old Hugh hold his sword. Hugh is now shaping up to be a fencing champion. I am morally sure that it was this event that started it, because before that, I'm sure Hugh's life was all about diggers.






The campsite is right next to Blair Drummond Safari Park on an old estate (I heard elephants in the night, by the way, and it took me ages to work out what the noise was.) The site itself is within an old walled garden, and there are lots of fine trees. I found a pitch on my own outside the wall with some trees and shrubs for company. There were rabbits, hedgehogs, chuckling pheasants, and lots of other birds, and some very good walks on the estate land. In fact, the only thing wrong was a slight falling-out with the campsite lady: I ordered some walking trousers on the internet and had them sent to the site, and she refused to sign for them (and didn't come and fetch me) and sent them back. She told me it was more than her job's worth to sign for things 'in case they're faulty'. I told her that was very unhelpful and she said no matter what I said I wouldn't change her mind. I paid for my Mars bar and my copy of the Scotsman and left. So no trousers, because no address. Hey ho.

PS. September 5, 2008, 11am - Bethan's bump turned out to be a little girl, Angharad, a sister for Idris!