WHEREVER I travelled in life I seemed always to arrive ten years too late.
“You think this is fun?” sniggered old hands at The Journal when this spotty-chinned, wide-eyed nineteen-year-old arrived in Newcastle. “You should have been here ten years ago; this was a great town then!”
They said the same when I turned up in Fleet Street and again when I sought fame and fortune in New York. When I landed in Australia it was the same old story. And my eventual homecoming to London, of course, came Just Too Late. The good old days were gone for ever; the great characters had passed on.
Is it only people in big cities who spend their lives looking through rose-tinted rear view mirrors? Rural communities seem to have a greater sense of timelessness, an appreciation of the way things are, have always been and will, quite probably, remain.
Tweedo Paradiso, the land I had left 35 years earlier, was much the same upon my return: similar landscape (slightly more traffic) and the same people, older now but familiar faces from my youth.
When death inevitably rearranges that social landscape there is a sad but stoical acceptance of a kind that I never found in the metropolis, where the passing of even the oldest amongst us takes on an artificial mantle of tragedy.
Perhaps country folk are closer to Nature. They see at close hand the changing seasons, the sowing and the reaping and the steady journey of animals from stable to table as necessary linkage in the food chain.
As a result, few people are better conditioned to meet their Maker.
This week, cunningly timing his departure to coincide with his favourite pub closing its doors, one of my oldest friends bade farewell at a grand old 84. Farmer Peter Logan of Callerburn only ever required a dark rum and pep and Guinness chaser to regale all who would listen with his tales of the old days, good and bad.
He told of Dads’ Army weapons dumps and emergency food stores hidden in caves in Kyloe Woods against a German invasion, and of lost days and drunken nights when a successful visit to Reston Mart could see profit turned to loss in the twinkling of a landlord’s eye.
Some of Old Logan’s pals began his week-long wake as he would have wished, with a winning day at Kelso Races. There The Byreman reminded all of the day Peter bumped into the auctioneer Tom Rankin, another great character from those good old days, and the two men fell repaired to the bar.
Having confessed drunkenly his wish to buy “two score of best breeding heifers” Peter awoke briefly to find himself beside the slumbering auctioneer on a flight to Ireland and again later on a flight back to Newcastle.
Two days later an Irish cattle truck arrived and, while Peter struggled to recall his winning bid, offloaded the most expensive herd of heifers Callerburn had ever seen.
But there was more. “What’s the donkey for?” asked the bemused farmer as the ass was led down the ramp.
“You bought him,” said the delivery driver, “after the seller told you a farm with a donkey would never go bankrupt!”
A PRICELESS moment from a recent high society Borders wedding (Zara Phillips was among the invited guests) occurred when the local knackerman – he hauls dead animals from farm to slaughterhouse – downed enough Dutch courage to ask the prettiest girl at the ball to accompany him onto the dance floor.
They made a fine couple and as he escorted the young lady back to her table the knackerman made so bold as to ask where she lived.
“Floors,” she replied.
“Floors Castle,” said her beau knowingly. “Your father works for the Duke of Roxburgh then?”
“Actually,” said the lass, “my dad IS the Duke of Roxburgh…”
