Memories & Summer of 2020 in Scottish Meanderings

I almost thought I wasn’t going to get anything written in here this month because I had some really strange lurgy thing for weeks on end which mainly took the form of constant low grade nausea, very disturbed sleep (five completely sleepless nights this month alone) and feeling absolutely unbelievably crap ALL the time.

Nothing distracted. Nothing helped. My poos went a horrible clay colour. And it scared the shit (no pun intended) out of me.

And then last Saturday it seemed to lift for no apparent reason whatsoever and I’m ok again. So I have no clue what that was all about but am thinking maybe I should go and get a blood test from the doc just to get things checked out. Won’t do any harm.

When I was in the thick of it I was on the phone to my brother, Ian, who is dealing with the estate of my late Uncle Tommy along with my cousin, Jane. Tommy never married and had no children so there will be some money coming to his six nieces and nephews and Ian was saying it should be a sizeable sum. And all I could think was it could be six trillion billion smackeroos - I really don’t care - I just want to feel better! And I totally meant it.


Isn’t it funny the things which evoke memories and take us right back to a different time and place in an instant?

The chiming of a carriage clock while watching The Crown one night had me right back in any favourite aunt and uncle’s house remembering their old clock on the sideboard which chimed in dulcet tones every quarter of an hour and was strangely comforting, not irritating.

Very much like the second chime of this one.


That produced all kinds of poignant memories of summer holidays, days out, trips in double decker buses, days at the beach, taking the dog for a walk, breakfast in bed, all sorts!

And then purely by swinging round an open bag of frozen carrots one afternoon so that the corners twisted to give a better seal, I was instantly transported back to my Dad’s baker’s shop where I did that exact same action a million times a week after school and on Saturdays.

Swinging paper bags full of rolls, softies, rowies, muffins, scones, pancakes, Chelsea Buns, Eccles cakes, Paris Buns, macaroons, custard fancies, jam doughnuts, doughrings, biscuits, pies of every kind and much much more quickly and efficiently while keeping up an easy banter with each customer and totting up the total of everything (in my head mind you!) all at the same time - I was a shy, quiet kid when I started working there and that job did wonders for my confidence :)

Fancier cakes and cream cakes were put into boxes - which was another tricky thing to master - you had to fold it just the right way for all the bits to slot into place, being careful not to get cream on your fingers or the box, while trying to keep up with the chatter, remember the next thing being asked for and how much it was all adding up to!

But the memory was very timely because the next morning a friend alerted me to a post in a Facebook group I’m part of called Inverness When You Were A Kid - old shared memories of my home town from those who live/lived there.

Someone had put up a post with a picture of the shop but when my great Uncle Tom had it before Dad -


- this would be around the 1920s/30s - my brother thinks it might be a promotional picture for the firm who supplied him with the vans. Uncle Tom is second from the left at the front of the shop with his daughter, Ray, to his left beside him - his only surviving child, having lost a son, Alexander, at age 3 and a daughter, Christabel, at age 9 (Dad said he was so grief stricken he ran through the streets of Inverness from the hospital to his house with Christabel’s body when she died).

Instantly there ensued a veritable flurry of comments from other people with lovely memories of the shop, Dad, the staff, the bread, cakes, vans, jobs, everything. Some of it was so nice I was moved to tears.

At the same time, completely unaware of this, one of our Canadian relatives, Stephen, descended from one of Dad's uncles, (Tom's brother) who had emigrated over there, was sharing some family photos he was going through, one of which was my grandfather's van. He also had a shop although a very much smaller one and more of a general store - way up in the Highlands of Scotland in a place called Nigg, near Tain in Ross-shire.

A large part of his bread and butter would have been deliveries to the outlying towns and villages round about and Stephen had found a picture of his van which we’d never seen before. He thinks it would have been taken around the 1920s as well - just a shame it's not great quality but you can't expect much from that era. He accompanied it with "On the back of the photo is just written 'Dan's Van'. In this age of COVID-19, delivery vans make up a lot of the traffic in our neighbourhood - Dan was a man a hundred years ahead of his time."


So there was Stephen sharing lots of lovely memories of Mam and Dad when him and his wife came over on a trip to Scotland just after they were married, my cousin was chiming in with more lovely memories of them and there was a whole host of lovely memories about Dad, the shop, etc. us as kids, pinging through every five minutes on my e-mail.

Compounded even further when I posted a pic in the Facebook group of the shop, staff and their families when Dad had it to show the difference between them which produced another slew of equally lovely memories!


That one would have been taken around 1960 judging by my roughly 2 year old toddler self at the front who looks like I have other plans and am trying to escape! My sister, ever my protector, is holding me in place. And I notice Uncle Tom still very much takes centre court while poor Dad is shoved at the back beside the iron gate (on its right beside the lady with short, dark, wavy hair), trying to get his face into his own picture :)

I love how well thought of he still is after 45 years :)

And on the theme of memories, Nikki decided to make a video of our lockdown summer just to prove that they all still had plenty of fun throughout it all and so that we could look back on it in the future to see what it meant to us. There’s a slight glitch around the five minute mark as she had to send it to me in two parts because it was too long to go in a oner so I had to marry the two together and I’m not clever enough to do more than that :)

The end of it is them all going back to school on the first day after lockdown. Plus cat.

I love the music she chose.