Requiescat in Pace

My late mum's only sister, my aunt Shirley, died suddenly this morning.  Her death wasn't unexpected, but it was way earlier than had been predicted.

From left to right in the photo are my mum, who died in 1996 aged just 56, my papa who died in 1959 aged just 46, my aunt Shirley who died today aged 65, and my nana who died just over two years ago aged 87.

So today the last of that family unit passed away, and the happy faces in the photo, taken at Garrion Bridge in Lanarkshire probably not very long before my papa died, are no longer with us.

Rest eternal grant unto them O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.

Happy birthday dad

It's my dad's 70th birthday today, St Patrick's Day.

Happy birthday dad.

I love you lots. Which I don't say often enough to you.

Unfortunately I don't think he reads this Blog, well why would anyone in their right mind, so I'll just have to say it in person this evening.

And yes, the photo is him.

Happy birthday

One hundred years ago today, on 18th October 1908, the man in the photos was born.

William Yuill Young was my grandfather, and he was a sergeant in the 1st Battalion of the Scots Guards.

Having traced my family tree a bit, I have an idea of what his own ancestry was, but strangely, considering this and the fact that he died in 1972 so I do actually remember him, I don't really know that much about the man behind the photos.

I remember he was tall, tall anyway for our family at around six feet, and I remember he had tattoos on his hands of birds. Bluebirds I think. And I believe that's a traditional military thing of that era.

I understand that the photo of him on the motorcycle was taken in Pirbright camp in Surrey, probably some time during the second world war. Still haven't worked out what sort of bike it is!

Anyway, this would have been his 100th birthday. Happy birthday papa.


Unrelatedly, it's currently half past three in the morning and I can't sleep.

I'm off to San Diego today, and my flight from Glasgow to London is in four hours, then from London to Los Angeles four hours after that. It's going to be a long day, because I arrive in California just before 3pm local time and I guess I'll be awake for a while after that!

Requiescat in Pace (again, or rather, still)

The concert went very well last night. Very well indeed. And I got the top A flat! I think. And we get to do it all again in a few hours at 6pm in Hyndland Parish Church in Glasgow. Do come along if you can.

Today though I am on a bit of a downer. I just don't feel as upbeat as I have done recently. The reason is that today is the 12th anniversary of my mum's sudden, unexpected, untimely and early death aged 56. I've blogged about it previously, so I won't dwell on it too much now. Well, I won't dwell on it here anyway, but I just can't seem to get it out of my mind today. Since last night at midnight in the taxi back home after the post concert drink in The Primary pub in Glasgow's Woodlands Rd in fact. Friends are a help though. Particularly RE. Thanks. And sorry for being somewhat distracted and grumpy looking this morning. I'll try to be better this evening.

They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we shall remember them. Rest eternal grant unto her O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon her.

Requiescat in Pace

Been busy lately visiting my gran in the nursing home to which she moved a couple of weeks ago after falling ill on, I think, Christmas Eve and spending a few weeks in hospital.

Sad to say though that after a short illness (short in comparison to her relatively healthy previous 87 years that is) she passed away last night. In no pain, and as comfortable as she could be.

I'm glad to have managed to spend some time with her in her final days, as obviously have other family members including my brother who, with one day of notice, flew over from his home in California on Friday to see her, and returned home yesterday morning. I'm glad he managed it. It was good to see him, albeit in those circumstances. Other family members have been magnificent in the time they have devoted to gran, and not just in the past few weeks. But I suppose that's what families do, isn't it?

Rest Eternal grant unto her O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon her.

But not too bright a perpetual light thank you very much, if that's OK, because she couldn't stand bright sunlight in her eyes.

Just had a call to say she will be taken to church on Monday afternoon and the funeral is on Tuesday. Work are very understanding and obliging, and so I think I'll take both days off.

Don't feel much like Blogging just now, funnily enough. Got choir practice tonight to take my mind off it, hopefully. More in due course.

And its colours they are fine

I was out for a ride on the bike on Sunday. I found myself passing Holytown in Lanarkshire and decided to stop off to spend a moment or two at the grave of my great grandparents, Sarah Shaw and John Henry, who were originally from Carrowlustia, Calry, Carbury, County Sligo in Ireland, and came over to Scotland, via a stay in Liverpool, some time before 1906.

Their grave is the one bottom centre of the photo at rather a jaunty angle.



I never knew John Henry, he died 8 years before I was born, but I well remember my Gran Henry, who died in February 1975, when I was 13. She was a formidable woman who, despite having been away from Ireland for 70 years never lost her broad, lovely, Irish accent.

All her days she was a member of the Orange Order, and I believe that in her latter years and confined to a wheelchair she was pushed along in various annual processions in Lanarkshire. I make no apologies for her in that regard. She was an adult and clearly had decided that this was something right for her and despite my opinions on this I have no right to say she shouldn't have been involved in it.

Anyway, as I was standing by their grave, I took the photo above and somehow it seemed right that people were marching past behind the Union Flag. OK, it wasn't the Orange Lodge, but a group of Boys' Brigade members, but I still can't help feeling that Gran Henry would have been happy to have that flag borne past her final resting place.

No pain, no gain

It didn't actually hurt!

Despite gleeful assurances to the contrary from several people beforehand, on Friday when they moved the angle of my ankle from the equinus (tiptoes) to the semi equinus (not quite so extreme tiptoes) position I felt no pain at all. Nausea and lightheadedness, yes, but no pain. And the nausea is apparently fairly common when a cast is removed and was there well before anyone moved my ankle. Very strange.

And there was good news too. When I had the accident the A&E doctor told me I would be in a cast for about six weeks. The following day the orthopaedic doctor told me it'd in fact be twelve weeks (three months). But on Friday I was told that having had the first cast on for 5 weeks instead of 4, the next one could be reduced to 3 weeks in the semi equinus position. I replied that this would obviously be followed by another cast but was told that I might have just a heel lift for the remaining time. I'm not 100% sure what that means because at the time I assumed it'd be something put into my own shoes to decrease the length of my tendon (i.e. lift me kind of onto tiptoes) but since then I have heard a credible suggestion that it will still be some sort of cast/bandage/whatever so I don't know for sure. I'm also guessing and indeed hoping that the crutches will no longer be necessary but I'm expecting to use walking sticks for a while. That's speculation though.

I've spoken to work, and they have offered to get me collected and taken back home every day while I can't drive (I had assumed that as soon as I get the heel lift I'd be able to drive but I've since been disabused of this notion!) and they will also put measures in place so that I can work in a downstairs office to save having to tackle the stairs. This is really good of them, and is much appreciated. So the bottom line is that I may well be back at work about a month before I thought I was going to be, albeit still unable to walk or stand normally.

Various plans I had to fill in my time (family tree research, scanning old photos and updating my website amongst other things) might now be returned to the back burner. But I'm happy to do this if I can get back into some sort of normality. Having recently had lots of time to sit around and, perhaps rather worryingly, think, I have realised that I have been subconsciously reassessing what things are important to me and what things aren't, with somewhat surprising conclusions. Surprising to me anyway.

I've now had a qualified acceptance of my offer on a new flat. It could still technically fall through (although this is hopefully unlikely) so I will still hold back from providing fuller details.

I like the sentiment in the image in this post.

A history lesson, a long trip and a sad ending

So cast your mind back a bit. On 27th January 1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. Around the same time (actual date unknown but estimated at 1757) one John Tiffin was born in Cumbria. Unlike the young precocious Wolfgang, John went on to become a farmer and he and his wife, Mary Porteous, had 7 children. All very boring I hear you say and you'd be right to think that, except John Tiffin and Mary Porteous are actually quite important to me because they were my great great great great great great grandparents on my dad's maternal line!

The photo on the right is Holme Cultram Abbey in Cumbria and it's where John is listed as being born, although in fact I suspect it's just where he was baptised, as were I believe all their children. The motorcycle in the photo is mine, and this was one of today's destinations in my 420 mile round trip to Cumbria and back. Sadly the Abbey "went on fire", as they say in Glasgow, in June this year when some local little bastards set it alight, basically destroying it and its contents including irreplaceable records. Twats.

As an aside, also descended from John and Mary was a man called Arthur Ernest Tiffin (known as Jock Tiffin) who in 1955 was the third General Secretary of the British Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU). Jock was my 2nd cousin 4 times removed! Basically his grandfather and my great (x4) grandfather were brothers.



Another destination today was Barrow in Furness. And yes it was also related to my family tree. My great great grandparents on my dad's paternal line were Henry Pittock (a Yorkshireman) and Sarah McIntosh (from Dundee). They and five of their children, including my great grandmother Sarah Ann Pittock, lived in 23 Napier St in Barrow in Furness at the 1881 census, although by the 1891 census they had moved to Motherwell and had several additions to the family. Henry was at various times a Steel Hammerman and an Iron Smelter and I guess the reason the family moved from Cumbria to Lanarkshire was that this was probably the time the iron & steel industry was expanding rapidly in Motherwell. But I digress. The house in the centre of the photo is 23 Napier St, although I'd guess the pebbledash finish and satellite dish probably weren't there in 1881!

Of interest, well to me anyway and this is MY Blog after all, is that in the 1891 census, when Sarah was about 16, the Pittock family lived at 29 Ann St in Motherwell (a street which is no longer in existence) and next door at number 27 lived a family including an 18 year old boy called John. Yes, you've guessed it, my great grandfather literally married the girl next door! In fact they married on 29th December 1893 in Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Motherwell, my home church and where I started my choral singing in the 1970's. Or in fact they actually would have been married in what is now the church hall which was built as the church and which is now in danger of being demolished to make way for flats. From the Glasgow & Galloway Diocesan Website:

Holy Trinity had it origins in a meeting held in the Dalzell Arms Hotel on April 25th 1882 to consider the possibility of starting a Mission in Motherwell in connection with the Episcopal Church in Scotland. A congregation gathered and services were held in Mrs Keith's schoolroom until, in June 1884, a corrugated iron church was opened. This building is now the church hall. A building committee entered into negotiations with the Duke of Hamilton for a building site, and the foundation stone of the present church was laid on 29th September 1894. The new church, built in red stone and dedicated to the Holy Trinity on September 28th 1895 is Early English in style. The building was consecrated on November 21st 1896.

On a related note, related to genealogy, not Holy Trinity Church that is, the best description I've ever read about why tracing your family tree can be so interesting is the following by Bill Bryson from the introduction to A Short History of Nearly Everything

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you."


On a sad note, while travelling back to Glasgow this evening I was in a line of traffic approaching the wee town of Ulverston (I think it was) doing no more than 30-40mph when suddenly with no warning I was aware of something large and black appearing under the front wheel of the bike. I felt a bit of a bump, no more, and on looking in my mirror I saw the black labrador then being hit by the van behind me and dragged along underneath for a bit. Of course we all stopped, but by the time I had pulled in safely and walked back, shocked, several people had lifted the badly injured animal onto the pavement where it died a short time later. I think by then it wasn't aware of anything as it was showing no signs of distress or pain and was unconscious, so I sincerely hope it felt no pain after the initial collision. Within seconds of me arriving back at the scene, just after the dog had been moved to the pavement, the police arrived and took charge. Fortunately both the driver and passenger of the van which hit the dog after me, and the driver of the HGV directly behind them, all said right away that they had seen the animal sprinting out from a gap in the fence straight onto the road and into the side of my bike without me having a chance to see it never mind react to it. It upset me, I have to say, that the animal died and that I had hit it, but I don't feel any guilt because it ran out into me, I genuinely wasn't speeding, and 3 independent witnesses saw the whole thing and without being asked told the police that it wasn't my fault. Doesn't stop me being sorry about it though. Although I do wonder where the owner was and why it wasn't wearing a collar. Anyway, it was a wee while before I felt like carrying on with my journey, but I'm home now and well on the way to being dry and thawed out. A nice long hot bath will be the order of the day fairly soon.

Phew, what a scorcher!

What a glorious day it's been. Far too warm to be working though! Ten of us from work decided to decamp at lunchtime and miss out on the normal canteen food (which is actually not too bad). We went to Jimmy Chungs in Stirling and ate as much as we could from the buffet, accompanied by lashings of Coke (we were working after all, although the beer was very tempting), and all for five whole pounds (after discount). You can't beat it!

On the way home it rained though, and right now it's still oppressively warm, but very dull and overcast. Thunder looms I suspect. The cats will not be pleased.

On another note, this is the first Thursday of the choir summer holiday and right now I'd usually be in the middle of rehearsal, but instead I'm realising that there really is bugger-all on TV on a Thursday! And that's with all the Sky satellite channels (apart from the pay-extra sport ones) so God alone knows how one would cope if you only had council-telly! Hey, what am I saying? I'm about to be reduced to, at best, Freeview, because the flat I'm going to be moving to doesn't accommodate Sky. Oh well, even more Websurfing might be the order of the day, so perhaps I'll make more progress in researching my family tree, and I'll update my real Website, and ........... ooh, the possibilities are almost endless!